In a critical race to determine the balance of power on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brandon Scholz, the campaign manager for conservative incumbent justice Patience Roggensack claimed that Roggensack's opponent, Ed Fallone, "trashes the court as an institution" and lacks the campaign funding to have any chance of winning.
Admittingly, Roggensack has several advantages in this year's Wisconsin Supreme Court race that Fallone doesn't:
1) Roggensack is the incumbent, and incumbents in state supreme court elections in Wisconsin usually have a much bigger incumbency advantage than incumbents in legislative or executive races, in fact, only twice (in 1967 and 2008) in Wisconsin history has an incumbent state supreme court justice lost either election to a full term following a gubernatorial appointment (2008) or re-election (1967).
2) Roggensack's campaign has raised considerably more money Fallone's campaign, additionally, the Club for Growth, a conservative front group, has been running television ads to support Roggensack's re-election campaign.
3) Fallone has no judicial experience whatsoever.
However, Fallone has every right to call the Wisconsin Supreme Court "dysfunctional" because it is dysfunctional. In the last two years, a justice put his hands around the neck of fellow justice, the four conservative justices, including Roggensack, changed the court's rules to allow judges to preside over cases involving those who donate to their campaigns, and the four conservative justices, including Roggensack, set the single most destructive precedent in American judicial history by ruling that the Wisconsin State Legislature isn't even bound by the own laws it writes, including the Open Meetings Law that Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald violated while ramming Act 10 through the Legislature.
Also, Roggensack herself had no judicial experience whatsoever prior to running for the state supreme court for the first time back in 1995, losing in the primary to Ann Walsh Bradley and Patrick Crooks (Bradley defeated Crooks in the general election). When Roggensack was once asked who her favorite U.S. Supreme Court justice, she showed her admiration for those who take an unorthodox path to power by choosing Robert Jackson, the last federal Supreme Court justice to not have a law degree. Roggensack is now criticizing Fallone, a Marquette University Law Professor, for taking on an unorthodox path to power himself!
Additionally, Scholz's complete discrediting of Fallone as a credible candidate on the basis that Roggensack, whose campaign is being run by Scholz, has raised considerably more money than Fallone is flatly absurd. In the 1990 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, Republican incumbent Rudy Boschwitz out-raised Democratic challenger Paul Wellstone, who, like Fallone, was a college professor prior to running for public office, by a staggering 7-to-1 margin, yet Wellstone defeated Boschwitz!
Money doesn't vote, people do!
I'm encouraging Wisconsinites to vote for Ed Fallone for Wisconsin Supreme Court on April 2 in order to restore integrity to the bench.