April 13, 2023
by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director
Last night, Wisconsin Watch, the great investigative reporting corps, put on an interesting panel at the Robinia Courtyard in Madison on the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
One of their investigative reporters, Jacob Resneck, noted how big donors drowned out the little donors in the fundraising game.
"[Judge Janet] Protasiewicz received nearly 25,000 individual donations for $50 or less, totaling $568,549. That’s still less than the $820,000 donated by the top 41 donors to her campaign,” he said, adding, that, as for her opponent: "[Former Supreme Court Justice Daniel] Kelly’s campaign received 3,803 individual donations of $50 or less totaling $139,620. That’s only a third of the amount from his top 21 donors who wrote $20,000 checks.”
Given that both parties now have learned how to play big in the money chase, Resneck said he didn’t think there was any appetite on either side for campaign finance reform.
Phoebe Petrovic, another investigative reporter for Wisconsin Watch, talked about the high turnout among young people, especially on campuses, and noted that “democracy” was the #2 issue, behind abortion.
(Which reminds me how totally wrong some of the national messaging gurus have been for the past three years, telling us not to even use the word “democracy” because it’s too abstract! They were wrong in the Biden campaign, the Evers campaign, and now the Protaseiwicz one.)
She also stressed that the redistricting issue played big. Resneck, added that the public has learned, “by osmosis,” about how badly rigged the maps have been over the past decade.
But, of course, it wasn’t “by osmosis,” but by the legal challenge in the Whitford case and the hard work of the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition and the tireless work of grassroots activists, and the advocacy of former Sen. Majority Leaders Tim Cullen and Dale Schultz, among others. (See Carlene Bechen’s article here for the history of this exciting movement.)
Matt DeFour, who heads Wisconsin Watch’s state capitol bureau, addressed the concern of many in the audience that Republicans may go ahead and try to impeach Protaseiwicz, as newly elected Sen. Dan Knodl has suggested.
DeFour said that it’s very unlikely to happen. He said people were extrapolating from a mathematical possibility: the fact that Republicans hold a majority in the Assembly and a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which is what they’d need to impeach.
But DeFour said the Wisconsin Constitution is clear about what you can impeach someone for, and Protaseiwicz has not committed a crime, so they’d have no basis for it.
DeFour also noted that we’ve had a “radical rightwing court” for a decade now and cautioned the new liberal majority not to go too fast in the opposite direction.
He also said that, depending on how aggressively the new liberal majority proceeds, it might be able to bring the swing conservative justice, Brian Hagedorn, with them on some issues. That is, if they go slow.
DeFour and Managing Editor Dee Hall were uncharacteristically circumspect when it came to a question on Daniel Kelly’s already infamous speech on election night.
Neither would comment on it directly, with Dee Hall only saying that they posted both Kelly’s election night remarks and Protaseiwicz’s online so readers could make up their own mind.