Uppity Wisconsin

The Obama administration is going to renominate Louis Butler for appointment as a federal judge. The Senate returned the nomination to the White House, along with several others, when it recessed at Christmas.

A GOP flack offers this negative comment on Butler:

"Voters across the state decided not to elect him to continue serving on the Supreme Court because they thought he was a radical judge who was legislating from the bench," Kristin Ruesch, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said.

More likely, voters narrowly decided against electing him because they falsely believed that Butler had found a loophole to spring from prison a sex offender who then went on to molest another child.

They thought that because Butler's opponent, Michael Gableman, ran a television commercial to make them think that.

Gableman's now an Injustice on the State Supreme Court.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is indignant over a proposed rule that justices recuse themselves from cases involving a party that has given them $1.000 or more, the Journal Sentinel reports:

The sharpest questioning came from Justice Michael Gableman, who is fighting an ethics complaint that he lied in his 2008 campaign and who faces several requests from criminal defendants that he step aside in their cases.

He expressed doubts about a plan from the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin that would require judges to recuse themselves from cases involving those who gave them $1,000 or more, saying it "starts with a presumption that judges are going to be tainted by 1,000 and willing to throw a case for 1,000."

That would be selling themselves pretty cheaply.

So how about $1.7-million, the amount Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent in support of his vicious, racially-charged campaign against Louis Butler? Would that be enough to disqualify him from hearing cases in which WMC has an interest?

As the old joke about the indignant prostitite goes, "We've already establshed what you are; we're just arguing about the price."

UPDATE: You couldn't make this up.

Well, well. Someone else besides me thinks last week's US Supreme Court ruling about judges hearing cases involving huge investors in their campaigns has something to do with Wisconsin, and even Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

When I wrote that the ruling meant Justices Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, both elected with millions of dollars of media from WMC, would have to recuse themselves, Rick Esenberg said I was all wet:

 Bill, in particular, when commenting on legal matters is almost universally wrong.

Of course, Esenberg -- hardly a disinterested party since he worked to elect Ziegler and Gableman -- also announced that Paul Soglin and I aren't lawyers so couldn't be expected to know anything. That was news to Soglin, who has thought he was a lawyer ever since graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1972.

Having trashed us both as know-nothings, Esenberg then backtracked about Soglin and me:

But let me grant them a point.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that Wisconsin Justices Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman must disqualify themselves from hearing any cases involving Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

That is an oversimplification, but not by much. Here is how the NY Times summarized the decision in a front page story today:

Elected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The decision, the first to say the Constitution’s due process clause has a role to play in policing the role of money in judicial elections, ordered the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court to recuse himself from a $50 million case against a coal company whose chief executive had spent $3 million to elect him.

The facts of the case are strikingly similar to what has happened in Wisconsin in the last three years.

Ever wonder where Randy Koschnick's campaign gets the funny numbers it uses in its bogus claims about Shirley Abrahamson's record?

Now it can be told, thanks to the latest campaign finance report Koschnick filed with the Government Accountability Board.

Koshnick has gone to Ms. New Math herself -- Jessica McBride Bucher.

She can be relied upon to cook the books according to any recipe you'd like, as she demonstrated by her endless number crunching to try to show that Justice Louis Butler never met a criminal or a defense motion he didn't like.

Koschnick's been trying to make the same case against Abrahamson. No wonder Koschnick's claims about Abrahamson are so far off base.

Ms. Bucher -- that's how she's listed in the reports -- used to do bad math as a hobby, burning the midnight oil and typing furiously on her blog, since closed to visitors. Now she's found someone to pay her -- $1,250 paid so far and another $1,000 still owed her -- for her work.

Wonder if she has malpractice insurance.

This piece of garbage, filled with recycled claims that have already been disproven. says more about Randy Koschnick than it does about Shirley Abrahamson.  Fortunately, in their wisdom the citizens of Wisconsin have decided not to contribute enough money to his campaign to allow him to dirty up the airwaves with it.

The last debate is over, and you have to say one thing for Randy Koschnick: He's consistent.

There's another thing you can say, too. With him on the Supreme Court, you can forget about those pesky checks and balances. What the legislature wants, the legislature gets.

His message in the final debate had a familiar ring:

Koschnick said he would be a judicial conservative who would tend to uphold laws passed by the Legislature as opposed to what he called a judicial activist like Abrahamson who often strikes them down.

He's fond of accusing Shirley Abrahamson of "legislating from the bench."

He's especially fond of accusing her of flouting the will of the legislature in the case of medical malpractice award limits.

Same with spending public money on religious schools. "The legislature passed it, so what's her problem?" is his basic question.

The medical malpractice issue is a centerpiece of his campaign, and of conservative complaints about the Abrahamson court before the right wing bought two seats and took the majority.

Mike Gousha, in a recent TV interview, asked Judge Randy Koschnick about his time as a public defender:

GOUSHA: Let me talk for a moment about the issue of your past; you were a public defender and there are some political conservatives who say they cannot support you because you defended a guy convicted of killing a police officer, Ted Oswald. Are you surprised?

Koschnick defends himself, citing Paul Bucher's admiration for his work in that case:

KOSCHNICK: ...(W)hen I was a public defender I did the cases that were assigned to me, I did them ethically and to the best of my ability. And I am proud of the work that I did as a public defender.

In the Oswald case, the DA in that case, Paul Bucher who prosecuted the case, wrote me a letter after the trial commending me for my ethics and following the rules of procedure in court. He supported me when I ran for circuit court judge about 5 years later in 1999, and he has publicly supported me now in my supreme court race.

Golly, gee, Paul Bucher must have mellowed as he's aged. We know he wouldn't support Koschnick because he's a conservative Republican, because the Supreme Court race is non-partisan (wink, wink.)

Ya gotta love the Capital Times headline:

Randy Koschnick soft on facts.

That says it all.

Judge Randy Koschnick's campaign for the Supreme Court is hard-pressed for money, so here's some gratuitous advice about how to save a few bucks:

For starters, shut down the campaign website and fire your press guy. With the Journal Sentinel and Steve Walters working for you for free, there's no need to pay anyone.

Koschnick doesn't even have to make an outrageous new charge or put out a new release to get a story from the JS and Walters any more.

The latest ran on Sunday, unprovoked by any new campaign developments. Walters and the JS were just concerned, apparently, that Koschnick's message wasn't getting out enough.

So, to help it along, they did a story repeating Koschnick's bogus claims that Justice Shirley Abrahamson is soft on crime. In fact, it's not clear that Koschnick has ever used that phrase. It is the newspaper that uses "soft on crime" again and again.  It's the JS shorthand for the slightly more nuanced things Koschnick has to say to keep from getting his hand slapped by some judicial watchdog.

The late Senator Bill Proxmire used to insist that he never endorsed any candidates in Democratic Party primaries. All he did was say who he was going to vote for -- and the candidate would take it from there. 

Sometimes, Prox would even write a letter saying who he was voting for.  His non-endorsements even ended up in TV commercials for candidates.

That distinction without a difference came to mind when reading Steven Elbow's story in the Capital Times about the "non-partisan" Supreme Court race.

Mac Davis, former GOP state senator who's now a Waukesha County circuit judge, is the one who appointed Randy Koschnick as chief judge in Jefferson County. That wasn't based on politics, he says. But the story continues:

And [Davis] said he's staying out of the Supreme Court race.

"I'm not endorsing any candidate," he said.

Yet he circulated nomination papers on Koschnick's behalf, as his signature on two nomination papers uncovered by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now attests.

And when a circulator turns in a nomination paper, here's the statement he/she signs:

When last we visited the campaign treasury of Judge Randy Koschnick, it had raised $14,000, including $9.995 from one Randy Koschnick.

Undaunted that his opponent, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, had raised 56 times that much, the Koschnick campaign said it was right on target with its fundraising.

His press release:

By the end of January, the campaign had already raised over $50,000 in its effort.

That got reported by the AP on Feb. 2 as:

Koschnick attempted to downplay the low numbers his campaign reported, saying he raised $50,000 last month and was on target.

That sounds as though he raised $50,000 in January. But Monday he actually had to file his pre-primary report showing his finances, and it reveals that he raised only $38,969 in January.

But you have to parse every word. He has now raised $53,144 total, has spent $8,000 and owes $8,000 more. So he has about $37,000 to work with, less than two months before a statewide election.

There's an old political term you may have heard, called "waving the bloody shirt."

There are multiple theories about its origins, but it usually refers to a politician using images of past violence to stir up the electorate's prejudices and win support. The word demagogue is often used in connection with it.

Which brings us to Judge Randy Koschnick's bloody shirt campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Koschnick doesn't let a day go by in his campaign against Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson without talking about a case he heard in Jefferson County, a case in which a majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, including Abrahamson, twice overruled him about whether a bloody shirt could be included as evidence.

Somehow, Koschnick even got the case to be discussed as part of his bio when he was introduced at a debate before the Wisconsin Newspaper Assn.

Here's how a Gannett reporter started her story:

Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson's opponent, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Randy Koschnick, had barely filed his nomination petitions when he began pressing the flesh -- at a gun show in LaCrosse.

Koschnick told WXOW-TV the gun show gave him a chance to meet voters. It was such a good chance he campaigned there two days in a row.

It speaks volumes about the candidate and his candidacy.

And, yes, the gun nuts at the National Rifle Assn. do endorse in Supreme Court races.

If Koschnick doesn't advertise the inevitable NRA endorsement when it comes, the Abrahamson campaign should. The Gableman race notwithstanding, the NRA's track record is pathetic. The vast majority of Wisconsin voters support reasonable restrictions on firearms, which is why the NRA is so ineffective politically.

Doubt that? Ask Gov. Jim Doyle, who was the NRA's number one national target for defeat when he ran for re-election in 2006. How'd that turn out?

That slimy commercial that Michael Gableman ran against Louis Butler in the Supreme Court race -- the one roundly condemned as false and racist?

It was simply a matter of the script being "poorly worded."

That's what Jessica McBride says, and she should know. More here.