If a picture is worth a thousand words,
this picture of newly RW anointed Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack is worth about ten thousand (I'm not sure if it's under copyright so I can't post it here). And then there's the accompanying article describing the chaos that Roggensack has brought with her to her shiny new leadership position.
Checked the picture out? Good. It's a lot more real that the smiling faced version she has on her website and uses in campaigns. But it pretty much says it all about someone that Urban Milwaukee is calling Lady MacBeth.
For more of the backstory on the recent changes in our Wisconsin Supreme Court follow this link. If you've been following the RW takeover or already read that piece, you may now continue to read what's happened since she and her fellow RW justices voted by email to put her in charge.
On April 29, state election authorities certified the referendum vote. Later that day, the conservatives voted by email to make Roggensack the chief justice.
When the RW has the majority of the votes, they wanted to ensure they owned the Chief, as well - impossible under Wisconsin law which established the most senior Justice was to be the Chief when the state was founded over 150 years ago. It took a lot of money and a huge amount of propaganda to fool voters about that change.
There seems to be very little actual patience in Patience Roggensack who has wasted no time in establishing her lock on power. Roggensack didn't even wait, as suggested by fellow RW extremist Justice David (the choker) Prosser, until August 1 when the courts' new term began. Nope. No public ceremony, no meeting, no handover of the gavel. A vote by email was taken and the Iron Fist of Roggensack began to pound out orders.
And the media noticed.
Let's start with Chief Justice Roggensack ignoring the calendar agreed upon last year and unilaterally giving her fellow justices a few days of notice of a meeting she scheduled to decide cases. Under the existing calendar, the Court wasn't scheduled to have any case discussions in May. Some Justices had conflicts and couldn't attend Roggensacks' very special and hastily called meeting. She wouldn't budge.
No problem, she related in an email. They just needed to email her "their votes" otherwise she would consider that they had "withdrawn" from the cases she had scheduled at the very special meeting. That threat didn't sit well with Justice Crooks, considered a conservative swing voter.
How can you vote without having, hearing or participating in a discussion? Apparently, discussions are now just window dressing because the 4 RW justices have the majority votes on every case to be decided. Discussions and hearing might have just become extinct at the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
And when did email become the means of voting on Supreme Court cases? That seems to have started with the vote by email to select Roggensack as Chief Justice shortly after the elections were certified in April (there was a heavily financed referendum to change the assignment of Chief Justice from "longest serving" to an election among the Justices - the first ever change in that process since the founding of Wisconsin over 150 years ago). The ink was barely dry on the certification when the RW pounced to vote in "their own" RW Chief. Now, they not only have the majority of votes on each and every case, but they now control the entirety of the court itself.
When reports of Roggensacks power grab and actions started being reported in Wisconsin, Roggensack immediately ran to Milwaukee RW radio host Charlie Sykes to whine about the coverage. Yes, folks, that's right - she used a RW ideological hate talker instead of a reporter or even public radio. Even former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske was horrified at her choice of venue.
“For Roggensack to choose a very partisan radio show to make her announcement about being a consensus builder is really a bad first step to rebuilding the court’s reputation,” Geske says.
The RW doesn't care how things look anymore. It's the arrogance of feeling entitled to power. They don't govern or care about justice. When in office,
they rule using every bit of authority they have, can muster, or can give themselves.
One of the most important cases the Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide will concern the John Doe 2 probe into illegal coordination between campaigns and dark money groups. Roggensack has already decided NOT to even hold a hearing on the case.
But it gets worse. Much worse:
Roggensack’s decision to get in bed with Sykes looks all the worse given the high-profile case the court is being asked to adjudicate. As I’ve written, Roggensack and the three conservative judges who support her have declined to recuse themselves from deciding whether the John Doe investigation should be shut down, despite the fact the two parties to the case, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, are parties to the case who could potentially face criminal charges. These two groups together spent $7.6 million to help elect these four justices, providing 76 percent of the support for Prosser, 69 percent of support for Justice Michael Gableman, 59 percent of the spending for Justice Annette Ziegler and 48 percent for Roggensack.
If these justices vote to kill the Doe, the clear message will be that “justice” was purchased for $7.6 million. That message will resonate all the louder now that Roggensack has let the entire state know she is only comfortable discussing court affairs with a talk show host who had repeatedly assailed the John Doe investigators as police-state thugs conducing a “a partisan witch hunt.”
(bolding is mine)
It won't just look like justice is for sale. It really WILL be on sale.
Stay tuned folks. From what I've seen, things can only get worse from here. Who knows, maybe the Clown Show Roggensack has created might even eclipse the ongoing WEDC corruption in state news coverage.
.
