Wisconsin Republicans Suffer Setbacks in Their Desperate Quest to Stop Democracy

The Speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly, Republican Robin Vos, is signaling that he will impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice if she decides an upcoming case in a way she doesn’t like.

There are many major symptoms associated with the modern Republican Party’s acute democracy allergy—from Donald Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election from Joe Biden to conspiring to reduce the number of ballot drop boxes on college campuses and everything in between—but few are as egregious as the GOP’s nefarious project in Wisconsin.

If a legislature is meant to reflect the citizenry, one might assume that Wisconsin is an unambiguously red state. The truth, however, is that Wisconsin is a purple state—with an effectively even split between conservative and liberal voters. And yet, a Wisconsin Republican government trifecta redrew the voting maps in 2011, which has enabled them to maintain a disproportionate legislative majority ever since.

The election of liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz in April 2023 shifted the balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the left. This, combined with the Court’s decision to hear a new challenge to the gerrymandered voting maps, now threaten to upend more than a decade of Republican control.

In response, Speaker Vos has signaled his intent to impeach Justice Protasiewicz if she declined to recuse herself from this case, citing campaign remarks from Protasiewicz that the voting maps are “rigged.”

But both a former Supreme Court Justice hired by Vos to determine whether Protasiewicz could be constitutionally impeached and the Wisconsin judicial commission have rejected Vos’s argument. Others have noted that conservative Justices have made similar remarks about other political topics and have accepted campaign donations from partisan groups who have had business before the court.

Vos suffered another blow when Justice Protasiewicz indeed declined to recuse herself, to the fury of her conservative Justice colleagues, citing arguments provided by the late, legendary conservative United States Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.

Whether Vos decides to shamelessly pursue a desperate bid to preserve his party’s artificial, antidemocratic majority by baselessly impeaching Justice Protasiewicz remains to be seen.