The long-standing conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court flipped for the first time in 15 years last week after liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in.
Liberal justices now have a majority as a result of the most expensive state judicial election in U.S. history after Justice Jill Karofsky entered her 10-year term, with party tensions on the rise ahead of the court’s term next month.
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Apprehensions between the justices escalated when Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, a conservative, blasted her liberal colleagues last week for firing the state courts director, Randy Koschnick, who was appointed in 2017 by the then-conservative court.
Ziegler said in a lengthy statement that the move against Koschnick, who was let go on Aug. 2, showed that “unprecedented dangerous conduct is the raw exercise of overreaching power.”
On Friday, liberal Justice Rebecca Dallet released a statement and said the majority of justices voted in a controversial move to shift power away from Ziegler to the new committee. Dallet wrote the decision was meant “to advance a number of transparency and accountability measures” in an effort to make the “court more accessible and more accountable to the people of Wisconsin.”
In a following statement, the justice expressed her “disappointment” in Ziegler for litigating the court’s problems “through media releases” as opposed to a “conference or through email.”
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Ziegler responded by saying in another press release that “four rogue members of the court met in a secret, unscheduled, illegitimate closed meeting in an attempt to gut the Chief Justice’s constitutional authority as administrator of the court.”
The dispute looms over the court’s term next month, when a number of high-profile cases are expected to be heard. These include a lawsuit seeking to undo the state’s ban and a move from national Democrats to reinstate the use of absentee ballot drop boxes ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
