Reading Time: 10 minutes

Click here to read highlights from the series

• A record $144.5 million was spent on Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. That’s more than every state Supreme Court election in 2021-22 combined, and far more than the $45.6 million spent in 2000 on all state Supreme Court elections that caused court watchers to warn about “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections.”

• Wisconsin’s two major political parties are now the largest donors to judicial candidates. The state has also seen an unprecedented level of out-of-state spending in recent years.

• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide, hot-button political issues like abortion and collective bargaining, loose campaign finance laws, lax recusal rules for justices and even holding elections in the spring are all contributing to Wisconsin’s unique spending situation.

• Wisconsin is one of 22 states that initially elect justices. The majority of states appoint them with some adding retention elections. 

• Public financing of elections has failed twice here, and the public remains strongly in favor of elections. Other states have found ways to combine merit selection or some other form of appointment vetting with retention elections to ensure justices are beholden to the law, rather than interest groups or political whims.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million, prompting the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on one Wisconsin Supreme Court seat reached $144.5 million, even more than the $100.8 million spent on 68 state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office. And the last two justices elected in Wisconsin received most of their individual campaign contributions from outside the state.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which candidate ideologies overshadow qualifications for an office requiring them to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion.
• Wisconsin’s narrowly divided electorate, state government and court composition.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened campaign finance limits.
• Lax recusal rules for justices in cases involving their major political donors.
• Electing justices in April, which grew out of an early desire for a nonpartisan judiciary.

Some of those factors have pushed up spending in high court races in other states into the eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has them all.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s shaping up to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

High costs for high courts

In Wisconsin, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each. The first million-dollar campaign featuring negative TV ads was in 1999, but the next year candidates pledged to run positive campaigns and it only cost $430,963.

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

But such spending  exploded after Justice Louis Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers without proving which company was responsible.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent an estimated $2.2 million to elect conservative Annette Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million to help Michael Gableman unseat Butler the next year. Both races set state records at almost $6 million apiece.

Similar story lines have played out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In the latest Wisconsin election, Elon Musk spent $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who lost to liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Musk’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas, instead pouring their money into television advertising with lurid accusations about how candidates handled criminal cases that have little connection to what the Supreme Court does.

Big donors are reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly, who lost multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023.

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump contested more than 220,000 absentee ballots from Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to toss the suit.

The 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin was decided by less than one percentage point. The same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years after Gableman’s election, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Parties crash in with cash

Wisconsin has tried to keep partisan politics out of court elections since its founding. The first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, aiming to discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer. Candidates in other states running in the fall are competing for donations with many other high-profile races, Keith noted.

Another major factor that has supercharged spending in Wisconsin came in 2015, when a Republican campaign finance overhaul allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 in 2016 to $423,615 in 2018. After fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state Democratic Party chair in 2019, state, local and national Democratic parties gave their preferred candidates $1.4 million in 2020, $9.9 million in 2023 and $11.8 million in 2025.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette Law School Poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

For the entire 2007-2025 period, spending on so-called “issue ads” — which try to persuade voters without explicitly endorsing a candidate — totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals.

Out-of-state donors didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, with Gableman being the biggest exception at 32%, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a campaign finance watchdog.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed each state to regulate abortions.

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate and took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin. Crawford, who had represented Planned Parenthood, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors or 69% of her individual contributions.

Public financing fails

Wisconsin has tried and failed to stem the tide of judicial spending.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision saying campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment, the Legislature enacted the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers could check a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. However, in 1986 the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation. Taxpayer participation waned from 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

After the record-spending 2007 campaign, all seven justices called for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections.”

But the system Democrats passed in 2009 lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before Republicans repealed it in 2011. New Mexico is now the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, wants to revive the law, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said she’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on issue ads or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose, but strict recusal rules for judges could disincentivize such expenditures.

After the 2007 and 2008 elections, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The petitions from groups such as the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

The court voted 4-3 in 2010 to adopt verbatim the rules backed by WMC. Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign.” A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit.

In 2017, 54 retired judges petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules. When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because contributions were capped at $1,000 from individuals and political action committees. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the 2015 law also loosened the coordination rules.

The retired judges wanted to require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse.

The issue could be revived. Liberal Chief Justice Jill Karofsky said at a WisPolitics event in October she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new court recusal rules.

Alternatives to electing judges

In the current legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin elects justices.

Not all of the other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to choose justices by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved an appointment system in which a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing justices faced pushback.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections because they “made justices more human and someone who people can identify with.” But her perspective has changed.

“People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” Geske said.

Geske said she leans toward appointment if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Kelly, the former conservative justice, also said he supports appointment with Senate confirmation. Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections.

February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party.

Nonpartisan or partisan elections?

Since 2000, all eight states with fully partisan elections have had million-dollar court contests, while only nine of the 13 states with nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have had one.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans backed the idea, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. 

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races.

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges; Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70; and Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election.

Supreme Costs: A condensed version of our series on the ‘obscene’ spending on Wisconsin justices is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter participates in a privacy roundtable at CES 2020 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Jan. 7, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court appeared ready to expand presidential power after hearing a case Monday on whether President Donald Trump can hire and fire members of independent federal agencies without cause.

The high court’s decision, expected by the end of the term in late June, could heighten presidential influence over agencies created by Congress that oversee monetary policy, nuclear safety, consumer advocacy and trade, among other major policy areas.

The court’s conservative supermajority speculated that Congress could wield more and more power over the executive branch regarding how independent multimember agencies are structured, for example establishing term limits for commissioners.

Oral arguments centered on a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent protecting the five-member panel atop the Federal Trade Commission from being fired for reasons other than “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” 

The 1935 decision, referred to by its short title Humphrey’s executor, upheld the Federal Trade Commission Act’s removal protection provision after President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired FTC Commissioner William Humphrey before his seven-year term ended. He died shortly after, and his executor sued and won.

Slaughter fired in March

Monday’s case stems from Trump’s March firing of Rebecca Slaughter, an FTC commissioner since 2018, when she was named during Trump’s first term. President Joe Biden reappointed her and the Senate unanimously confirmed her for a second term in 2023.

Trump fired Slaughter on March 28 in an email that said her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” Slaughter sued and won in federal district court and at the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued to the justices Monday that Congress is “shaving away from the president’s control.”

The conservative justices homed in on Sauer’s argument.

In an exchange between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Slaughter’s counsel, Amit Agarwal, Barrett said, “If we decide this case in your favor, we don’t know what a Congress in 15 or 20 or 30 years might do.”

Agarwal responded, “We haven’t seen this problem materializing at all.”

“The real world danger that is imminent right now, that we know will happen, and that is that if petitioners get their way, everything is on the chopping block,” he said.

A few minutes later, Justice Brett Kavanaugh challenged Agarwal’s argument that if the president wants a structural change to an independent agency, he or she can work with Congress.

“You’ve mentioned many times, you can just go to Congress to fix this. Well, once the power is taken away from the president, it’s very hard to get it back in the legislative process,” Kavanaugh said.

Agarwal disagreed and argued that “exactly the opposite” has happened, in that Congress has ceded power to the executive branch over time.

Debate over stability in agencies

Kavanaugh also took issue with Agarwal’s argument that statutory guardrails baked into laws that govern independent agencies provide stability across administrations.

Agarwal pressed back, calling it “a problem on steroids” if independent agencies were completely shaken up every time a presidential administration changes and staggered terms were ignored.

“The whole point of this structure is to guarantee a modicum of stability that private, regulated entities can depend upon, and that is jeopardized by at-will presidential removal,” Agarwal said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of three liberal justices, said the administration’s appeal to justices could “open the door for the president to come in, each new president, and clean house in terms of all of the individuals who are running that agency.”

“Notwithstanding their expertise and knowledge and experience and the things that they are doing to promote the mission of the agency,” Jackson said. “And presumably the president could install whoever he wanted in those positions.”

Argawal responded: “Think about it in terms of commissions like the Federal Elections Commission. Would anyone want those sensitive election-related determinations to be under the plenary control of a political actor? 

“Think about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Can’t Congress and the president come together and say those types of technical determinations that could have massive implications for the public in all kinds of ways, should be made by a multimember body of experts?” he continued.

But during his rebuttal, Sauer warned of a scenario where “Congress could reconstruct virtually the entire executive branch outside the president’s control.”

Fed firing up next

The arguments lasted two-and-a-half hours and could be a preview of oral arguments in January that will center on Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook.

The seven-member board governing the central bank sets U.S. policy, including interest rates. Trump has slammed Federal Reserve leadership for months for not lowering interest rates at a faster pace.

The case comes on the heels of a federal appeals court decision Friday that Trump “permissibly removed” members earlier this year from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The FTC was established in 1914 under President Woodrow Wilson to protect consumers from unfair business practices.

Sauer, formerly the Missouri solicitor general, was previously the president’s own defense lawyer and argued on Trump’s behalf before the Supreme Court last year on the question of presidential immunity. 

Reading Time: 14 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the third in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin is one of the only places on Earth that thrusts top judges into big-time politics.

Here Supreme Court candidates compete in officially nonpartisan statewide elections that have grown increasingly polarized and expensive, with campaigns now costing far more than those in any other state. This spring’s $144.5 million high court contest marked the first time that campaign spending approached that of recent races for governor and U.S. senator.

By contrast, the federal government and the majority of other states and countries appoint their judges. Some of those appointed judges eventually must face voters, but only in yes-or-no retention elections intended to avoid the political heat of head-to-head campaigns.

Not all of those other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to ensure that Supreme Court justices are chosen by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing every justice faced strong political headwinds. No other state has dropped judicial elections in four decades.

Some Republicans are even pushing in the opposite direction, calling for Wisconsin to join the eight states that pick Supreme Court justices in fully partisan elections.

The trail to big-money campaigns

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, electing judges was a new and controversial idea. Most judges had been appointed since their federal or state courts were created. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for lifetime appointments to preserve federal judges’ independence against political pressures.

But some states started to embrace judicial elections in the populist wave that followed President Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election. That was partly a reaction to judicial appointments that were seen as political rewards, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said in 2009. Mississippi was the first to switch in 1832, followed by New York in 1846 — just before Wisconsin’s first constitutional convention. 

Walworth County delegate Charles Baker argued during the convention that electing judges was consistent with democratic principles, according to the State Law Library. That view was met with thunderous opposition from Racine County delegate Edward Ryan, a future chief justice, who asked of the judiciary, “Must its judgments represent the will of the people? No sir! No sir! God forever forbid it! … It represents the eternal principles of truth and justice.”

As a compromise, the new constitution banned electing judges at the same time as other state officials, in an attempt to discourage political parties from nominating judicial candidates. After parties didn’t take the hint, the Legislature outlawed party labels on judicial ballots in 1891.

Meanwhile, every state admitted between the Civil War and the 1950s decided to elect at least some of its judges. Those races were initially partisan, until 1873, when Chicago-centered Cook County, Illinois, pioneered nonpartisan judicial elections, a concept that spread during the Progressive Era. Of the 22 states that now elect high court justices, 13 (including Wisconsin) have fully nonpartisan elections, eight have fully partisan elections, and Michigan nominates justices at party conventions but doesn’t list partisan affiliations on general election ballots.

Yet nonpartisan elections haven’t kept big money and ideological divisions out of state Supreme Court races. As documented by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, many states’ high court campaigns have ballooned past $1 million in spending over the past 25 years, driven by special interests trying to influence rulings on social, political and economic issues that include hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Since 2000, nine of the 13 states with fully nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have seen at least one $1 million-plus high court race. But every state with fully partisan elections has had million-dollar court contests, along with partly partisan Michigan. 

Taking the ‘non’ out of nonpartisan

Political parties have helped push up the price tag for Wisconsin’s formally nonpartisan elections, aided by a state law allowing unlimited donations to candidates. The last three Supreme Court races drew $34.1 million in party cash, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 2-to-1.

Voters seem to have mixed feelings about the partisan involvement. On one hand, 61% of Marquette University Law School Poll respondents in February said they believe party contributions cut into judicial independence, while only 38% said partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Yet the partisan passions ratcheted up by big spending and polarizing issues have dramatically transformed how closely Supreme Court results reflect the most recent presidential vote.

In 1978, county-level results showed almost no relationship between the two, according to calculations by Marquette Poll Director Charles Franklin. But the correlation has trended sharply upward, particularly after the start of multimillion-dollar races in 2007, Franklin found. Last spring, his calculations showed a 98.5% correlation between support for liberal now-Justice Susan Crawford and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and between backing for conservative Brad Schimel and GOP President Donald Trump.

“It’s a stunning change, but not a new change,” considering how the partisanship evolved over time, Franklin said.

Nationwide, however, nonpartisan elections may still affect how voters react to candidates, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In nonpartisan races in Montana, Arkansas and Kentucky, “voters chose the candidate who ran the less overtly partisan campaign,” Keith said. 

By contrast, Keith said, voters seem more likely to treat partisan high court campaigns like other partisan races — including in Ohio, where the Republican-controlled Legislature switched from a variation on the Michigan method to fully partisan elections, starting in 2022.

Franklin, Keith and other experts also believe that Wisconsin’s spring elections, originally designed to deter partisanship, could have had the opposite effect, by taking high court races out of competition with other major contests where candidates are seeking donations and attention. Most other states hold judicial elections in the fall, regardless of whether they’re partisan or nonpartisan, with only Georgia and West Virginia joining Wisconsin in the spring.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. That idea was backed by nearly two-thirds of Republicans, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

However, politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.

In 2009, after the conservative candidate won a brutal, record-spending Wisconsin high court race the previous year, Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, and other Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish nonpartisan spring elections and elect all public officials in the fall. The measure died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Legislature.

That was when conservatives were more likely to vote in low-turnout contests, said Franklin and UW-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. Now liberals have the edge in those races, Franklin and Lee said, and support for partisan elections has flipped. 

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. GOP state Rep. Dave Maxey, chair of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, and Van Orden’s Republican House colleague Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, are open to discussing that idea, their spokespeople said.

Such a major change would cause numerous complications for thousands of currently nonpartisan local officials and lower court judges, as well as presidential primaries, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, president of the Wisconsin County Clerks Association.

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, another GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for a more modest change: shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

In an interview, Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

Both Schoemann and a Tiffany spokesperson said maximizing voter participation would be the main reason to reschedule elections.

Because constitutional amendments must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and then in a statewide referendum, any change would be at least a few years away.

Pointing back to appointment

By the 1920s, some states were growing disillusioned with judges’ involvement in electoral politics. Nowhere was this concern greater than in Missouri, where Democratic Party boss Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City machine regularly defeated state Supreme Court justices who ruled against its wishes, according to a 2014 report by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved a new method of appointing judges. Under that system, now called the Missouri Plan, a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Kansas was next to adopt the Missouri Plan in 1958, after its governor resigned a few days before his term ended — and was promptly appointed to the state Supreme Court by the lieutenant governor who succeeded him. Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states, including Iowa.

Merit selection is supposed to guard against the appearance of “cronyism, patronage and self-dealing” that can arise if a governor or president has no limits on nominating judges, according to a 2018 Brennan Center report.

“With merit selection, candidates move forward in the process based on their qualifications and

experience,” the 2014 IAALS report said. “In other systems, the amount of money spent in an election campaign, name recognition, and political or party connections can be the determinative factors.”

For example, Indiana law requires that state’s Judicial Nominating Commission to “consider each candidate’s legal education, legal writings, reputation in the practice of law, physical ability to do the job, financial interests (for conflict-of-interest purposes), public service activities, and any other pertinent information the commission feels is important to select the most qualified candidates.”

A 2021 paper in the Journal of Public Economics found that justices chosen in merit selection processes or nonpartisan elections produced better work — as measured by how often their rulings were favorably cited in other judges’ decisions — than justices chosen in partisan elections.

Missouri was the first state to create an independent commission and require the governor to choose from its list. In most of the 11 states with that approach, no single official or institution dominates commission appointments, and members may be appointed by various elected leaders, the state high court or the state bar association. Some states also call for geographic or demographic diversity among commissioners.

However, not all commissions are equally independent. In 11 of the 22 states where such commissions advise governors, the governor can either appoint a majority of commission members or choose a candidate who’s not on the commission’s list. In South Carolina, legislative leaders appoint a commission to screen candidates for election by lawmakers.

Four other states allow governors to nominate high court justices without consulting a commission, although some of those governors may create their own advisory panels and all of those appointees must be confirmed by lawmakers or other officials. 

Confirmation is also required in seven states with governor-controlled commissions and three states with independent commissions.

Virginia’s legislature elects justices without nominations from either the governor or a commission.

Contentious races build support for appointments

In 1999, after Wisconsin’s first million-dollar Supreme Court race, then-state Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, introduced a constitutional amendment to let the governor appoint high court justices with Senate confirmation, but without a nominating commission. The measure drew bipartisan support but died in committee in a Republican-controlled Assembly. After three even more expensive races, then-state Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, introduced a 2009 amendment calling for appointment with confirmation and retention elections. It died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Assembly. 

Abrahamson, the state’s first female justice and the only one to win four contested elections, opposed a switch to appointment. “Elected judges are more apt to go and speak with the people about the judicial system and listen to their concerns,” the late justice said in 2009.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections for the same reason: “It made justices more human and someone who people can identify with,” in contrast to more isolated federal judges. But Geske added, “I liked the elected judiciary until all this happened (with big-spending television-centered campaigns). People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” mainly criminal cases in lower courts.

Now the moderate Geske said she leans toward appointment, but only if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and only if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Former Justice Dan Kelly, a conservative who lost back-to-back multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023, said he also supports appointment, with Senate confirmation. Citing the Federalist Papers, Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections in which “campaigns have become explicitly political.”

However, Kelly — who was appointed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to fill a vacancy — disagrees on one key point with Geske, an appointee of GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson. Kelly said the governor should be free to name someone outside a nominating commission’s list as a check on a panel that may have been “politically captured” by special interests.

Kelly’s comments echo a frequent conservative critique of the Missouri Plan — that nominating commissions may be controlled by liberal-leaning lawyers. Although some states specifically require non-lawyer representation on nominating panels, a 2019 study by the Brennan Center’s Keith found attorneys dominated most commissions, with corporate and plaintiff’s attorneys outnumbering prosecutors and public defenders. 

In Kansas — the only state where the bar association names a majority of the commission — the Republican-controlled legislature has endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish the merit selection process and return to electing justices. If voters approve the amendment in August, lawmakers would decide whether the elections should be partisan or nonpartisan.

Although 13 states switched from elections to merit selection in the 1960s and 1970s, Utah was the last state to do so in 1985, while Rhode Island was the last state to convert its appointment process to merit selection in 1994, according to IAALS. Voters rejected merit selection of high court justices in Ohio in 1987 and in Nevada in 1972, 1988 and 2010.

Geske and Burden said it would be challenging to convince Wisconsin legislators and voters to drop judicial elections for merit selection. February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party. And in 2018, voters resoundingly defeated a GOP-backed constitutional amendment to end elections for state treasurer.

“On the other hand, Republicans are having their heads handed to them in Supreme Court races, so there may be some interest” among GOP lawmakers in appointment, Burden said. Liberals have won four of the last five high court races by double-digit margins and now hold a 4-3 majority on the seven-member court. Conservatives are defending seats in 2026 and 2027 and won’t have a shot at regaining control until 2028 — or later if liberals boost their majority in April.

Governors have appointed 46 of the 81 justices who have served since statehood. Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking re-election in 2026, is the only current member of the court who was originally appointed.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee. By contrast, 29 states require governors to use nominating commissions in filling vacancies, and 17 states require confirmation of justices appointed to fill vacancies. Lawmakers fill vacancies in South Carolina and Virginia, and sitting justices fill vacancies in Illinois and Louisiana.

In 2000, a Wisconsin state task force on judicial diversity endorsed the governor’s use of an advisory committee to screen candidates, but opposed writing the practice into the state constitution. It didn’t recommend creating a more independent commission or requiring the governor to choose only applicants recommended by the committee.

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. 

Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races. California, Maryland and Tennessee combine confirmation and retention elections. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, justices initially chosen in partisan head-to-head elections must run in retention elections for subsequent terms. And in Montana and New Mexico, regular elections become retention elections if nobody files to challenge an elected incumbent.

“Because judges do not face opponents in retention elections, they usually do not need to raise money and conduct campaigns,” IAALS says on its website. “At the same time, special interest groups are not as active in retention elections as they are in contested elections, because a good judge’s performance speaks for itself” and even if they try to oust an incumbent, “they cannot select a replacement who fits their particular agenda.”

Nonetheless, special interests have targeted some retention elections, driving them into the multimillion-dollar range. According to the Brennan Center, that trend was accelerated by a $1 million race in 2010, when conservatives waged a successful campaign to defeat three Iowa Supreme Court justices after the seven-member court unanimously overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Retention election spending peaked at $9.9 million in 2020, when conservatives ousted a Democratic justice from the Illinois Supreme Court. 

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters in either head-to-head contests or retention elections, the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

“Extensive evidence suggests that election pressures impact judicial decision-making in a wide array of cases, and that retiring justices rule differently than those seeking to keep their jobs,” the Brennan Center wrote in its 2018 report.

Among the 46 states where justices stay in office through elections or reappointment by elected officials, New York’s 14-year terms are the longest, followed by five states with 12-year terms.

Conversely, “15 years is a long time to go without any accountability to the public,” said Danielle Kalil, IAALS director of civil justice and the judiciary.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, the Brennan Center cited four states that found other ways to insulate them from political pressure:

• Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges.
• Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70. 
• Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Judging the judges

Working with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, IAALS came up with a system for adding judicial performance reviews to the Missouri Plan, to help inform voters before retention elections. The institute now advocates for that modified plan, which it named after the late justice.

“Most Americans undergo job evaluations, and there is no reason why judges should not do the same,” IAALS says on its website. Such evaluations focus on “holding judges accountable to high quality job performance while maintaining judicial independence, by focusing on politically neutral qualities like impartiality, case administration, and clarity of communication rather than specific case outcomes.”

Alaska was the first state to use judicial performance reviews, starting in 1976. Now seven states release evaluations to voters before retention elections, five others use evaluations in reappointment decisions, and four share them only with judges. Hawaii and New Hampshire also release summaries that don’t identify specific judges. Republican-led legislatures ended evaluations in Kansas in 2011 and Tennessee in 2014.

IAALS recommends that evaluations be conducted by independent commissions, separate from nominating commissions. Kalil said evaluating commissions should survey attorneys and possibly others involved in the justice system and observe judges in courtrooms.

Cut-rate campaigns

Even if states elect high court justices, multimillion-dollar campaigns aren’t inevitable. Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices in five contested and five uncontested races from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million to elect seven justices in six contested campaigns and one uncontested election, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities research fellow Eric Ostermeier said.

Minnesota’s elections also have been far less competitive than Wisconsin’s, said Ostermeier, the author of the Smart Politics blog. Since 2000, the average margin of victory in Minnesota has been 23 percentage points across 20 contested elections, almost twice the 11-point average in 14 contested Wisconsin elections. Only one Minnesota race was decided by a single-digit margin, compared with five in Wisconsin.

Perhaps most telling, Minnesota’s incumbent justices never lost an election and the state never had a wide-open race for any seat in that time, while Wisconsin voters ousted two appointed incumbents and six elections lacked incumbents.

Regardless of whether states elect or appoint justices, “no system is perfect,” Kalil said.

Yet public sentiment could be shifting toward change, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the election watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

“People are becoming fed up and tired,” with the flood of attack ads, Ramos said. “People are becoming more receptive to doing something.”

Sick of those state Supreme Court campaign ads, Wisconsin? Here’s how other states avoid them is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a host of Republican bills Friday, including legislation barring undocumented immigrants from getting federal health care funding.

The post Evers vetoes bill to block Medicaid funds from undocumented residents appeared first on WPR.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

The U.S. Supreme Court said Friday justices will hear a case to decide if President Donald Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship is constitutional.

The court agreed to hear a case, before it is decided in a lower court, that deals with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States. The amendment’s birthright citizenship clause has been used to give citizenship to the children of immigrants in the country without legal authorization or on a temporary basis.

While a schedule for arguments has not yet been released by the court, it’s likely the case would be heard sometime in early 2026.

The Trump administration argued in its petition to the court that the amendment, which was adopted in 1868, was meant to apply to newly freed slaves. It was not meant to provide citizenship to the children of immigrants without legal status, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

“Long after the Clause’s adoption, the mistaken view that birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law became pervasive, with destructive consequences,” Sauer wrote in the September petition.

The petition also sought Supreme Court review of a related challenge to the order by the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon. Friday’s court order did not grant a hearing on that case.

Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 seeking to redefine the birthright citizenship clause to exclude the children of immigrants in the country without legal authority or only temporarily. Democratic-led states and advocacy groups swiftly sued.

Courts have largely blocked enforcement of the order, although the Supreme Court in June allowed it to go into effect in the states that had not sued to preserve the right.

In a Friday afternoon statement, the American Civil Liberties Union, a leading civil rights group, noted that several federal judges had blocked enforcement and predicted the Supreme Court would preserve birthright citizenship.

“No president can change the 14th Amendment’s fundamental promise of citizenship,” Cecillia Wang, ACLU’s national legal director, said. “For over 150 years, it has been the law and our national tradition that everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen from birth. The federal courts have unanimously held that President Trump’s executive order is contrary to the Constitution, a Supreme Court decision from 1898, and a law enacted by Congress. We look forward to putting this issue to rest once and for all in the Supreme Court this term.”

Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, speaks at a press conference on the Wisconsin Supreme Court case challenging the legality of Wisconsin law enforcement agencies' cooperation agreements with ICE | Photo via Voces de la Frontera Facebook video

In Wisconsin we have been watching in horror as President Donald Trump’s lawless immigration crackdown terrorizes communities in our neighboring states of Minnesota and Illinois. 

Here at home, so far, things are mostly quiet. Farmers in western Wisconsin report no ICE raids on the dairies where 60% to 90% of workers are immigrants without legal status. There have been a few high-profile arrests and deportations in Milwaukee, Madison and Manitowoc, but nothing like the scenes of chaos in the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis, where masked federal agents are aiming guns at civilians, smashing out car windows and dragging parents from their children, hustling them off to detention centers to be fast-tracked out of the country without due process.

One of the most disturbing things about this campaign of terror is that it seems to be directed by the president’s whim. In a Thanksgiving post full of invective and schoolyard insults directed at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump denounced the Somali community he claimed was “completely taking over the great State of Minnesota.” One week later, CBS News confirmed that ICE operations were underway targeting Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities.

Since we can’t count on the federal government to stay inside the bounds of reason or the law, it is critical that local and state leaders stand up to the racist, unconstitutional and unAmerican assault on immigrants. 

It was good news when, on Wednesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court accepted a case filed by the state chapter of the ACLU on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, contending that Wisconsin law enforcement agencies do not have the authority to make arrests or keep people in jail on detainers based solely on ICE’s administrative warrants.

Tim Muth, the ACLU of Wisconsin’s senior staff attorney, said hundreds of people throughout the state are being illegally held for days.

“It is extremely important for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to determine whether any law enforcement in Wisconsin has the legal authority to put or keep people in jail when they have not committed a crime and when no judge has issued an arrest warrant,” Wisconsin immigration attorney Grant Sovern wrote in an email to the Examiner. “Anyone in Wisconsin would want dangerous people to be kept from the public. But ICE is currently making no determinations about dangerousness or the likelihood to show up for a hearing if a summons is issued. A summons is a perfectly rational and legal way to address a civil legal question like someone’s immigration status. Jailing people before any independent adjudicator determines someone to be dangerous is against the Constitution and not the Wisconsin way.”

At a press conference Wednesday, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces, told the story of a landscaper in Green Bay who was picked up for driving without a license (immigrants without legal status are barred by a 2007 state law from obtaining driver’s licenses). He was sent to county jail and then handed over to ICE. “He was a grandfather, very active in his church,” Neumann-Ortiz said, describing him as “someone who does not represent any kind of threat to society at all” and who, on the contrary, is a pillar of his community and beloved by his family. 

Voces helped fight the deportation in a case that is still working its way through the courts. “At least he’s out and together with his family,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “But that’s an example of how people can be impacted by this.” 

As it scrambles to meet arbitrary deportation quotas, ICE sends detainers even for people who have never been convicted of a crime and have only minor charges pending in Wisconsin courts. 

Voces has been fighting at the local level since the first Trump administration for local law enforcement to refuse to collaborate with ICE unless there is a judicial warrant for someone, meaning that person is being sought in connection with a serious crime. As a result of Voces’ efforts, that is now the standard in Milwaukee County. The state Supreme Court case is an effort to establish the same standard statewide.

Neumann-Ortiz said she’s grateful the Supreme Court justices recognized the urgency of the issue in agreeing to take the case on an expedited basis, “given the current level of abuse that we’re seeing happen, and which will only escalate.”

And, she added, “We certainly very much anticipate Milwaukee being one of the cities that will be targeted for militarized occupation with these aggressive sweeps.”

Whether or not Wisconsin communities can protect people from the kind of violence we’ve been seeing in other states depends on the courageous actions of state and local officials, advocates and informed community members. It begins with recognizing that the Trump administration’s actions are wrong and then standing up.

At the press conference, a reporter asked about ICE’s assertion that the agency doesn’t have room for everyone in its detention facilities and therefore needs space in county jails. Muth responded: “Detain fewer people.”

Neumann-Ortiz added some clarifying context. “They are profiling people, they are just grabbing people without any probable cause. So it’s a very racist program that is using violence against people and is trying to hijack, through bribery and through threats, local law enforcement to be part of this mass deportation machinery,” she said. 

“We’re seeing, at the local level, community come together,” she added, “to reject these efforts to undermine local law enforcement — which is supposed to play a public safety role — into just this arm of deportation driven by xenophobia and racism. And which is making a lot of money for the for-profit prison industry.”

This year, communities across the state have pushed back on 287g partnership agreements between local law enforcement and ICE that turn sheriff’s departments into an arm of the federal immigration agency. Palmyra, Ozaukee and Kenosha counties rejected ICE’s offers of money to transform their sheriffs into agents of federal immigration enforcement.

The Kenosha sheriff’s office made its decision not to participate after the ACLU and Voces had already named it in the Supreme Court lawsuit, along with Walworth, Brown, Sauk and Marathon counties. Palmyra also reversed a decision to accept a large payment from ICE to participate, responding to public outrage.

“Resistance is happening, it’s successful, it’s building community,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “But we do need state protections to uphold our rights.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Reading Time: 13 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the second in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were concerned.

For the first time, a campaign for a high court seat had topped $5 million in spending, driven by negative television advertising that had rarely before been part of this state’s judicial races. They feared it could happen again.

That’s why all seven justices — conservatives as well as liberals — signed a 2007 letter to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature, calling for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections” to protect the court’s reputation against “the risk … that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign.”

It took two tries — and two more big-spending high court elections — before a Democratic-led Legislature and Doyle enacted a public financing law in 2009. But it lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before a Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Scott Walker repealed it in 2011.

The justices still had their own chance to protect the court’s reputation, by strengthening the rules for when they would have to step aside from cases involving their financial backers. Instead, they adopted what might be one of the nation’s most lax recusal rules for campaign donations. 

Three of the conservative justices who had signed the 2007 letter were part of the 4-3 majority that enacted a 2010 recusal rule largely written by the major business organization that was pumping millions of dollars into conservative high court campaigns.

The stories behind that shift in recusal rules, the short-lived venture in public financing of high court races and the campaign finance laws that followed help explain how Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign spending exploded this spring to a national record of $114.2 million — almost 20 times the cost of that first big-money election 18 years earlier. That total doesn’t include billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial $30.3 million effort to hand out checks to conservative voters.

Yet the history of public financing and attempts to tighten recusal rules also offer hope for those still trying to stop the trend of ever more expensive judicial races.

Checking a box for reform

Public financing responds to a central concern that current and former justices and others voice about multimillion-dollar Supreme Court elections — the perception that big donors are buying justices who will rule in those donors’ favor when their cases reach the court.

“Why do people think this is a good use of their money? What do they think they are getting from this court?” Justice Brian Hagedorn asked about big donors in an August interview with Milwaukee’s WISN-TV. “It is in many respects a vote of no-confidence in this court — that this court is not going to be a place that’s just going to apply the law, at least all seven of us.”

Advocates of public financing believe voters and taxpayers should be a candidate’s biggest donors. Candidate campaigns receive grants from state or local governments while agreeing to limits on spending and on how much they accept from individual and organizational donors.

That wasn’t a new idea in Wisconsin in 2007. A public financing system already had been in effect for 30 years for candidates for all state offices, including Supreme Court justices. 

The Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech — unless candidates voluntarily agreed to limit their spending in exchange for public financing.

The Legislature responded by enacting the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers decided how much the state campaign finance fund should receive each year, by checking a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The vast majority of candidates in both parties accepted public financing and ran campaigns under spending limits.”

However, the system declined for several reasons, the Democracy Campaign report found. In 1986, the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation, leaving them frozen at that year’s levels. Also, even though the $1 checkoff didn’t increase any individual’s taxes, taxpayer interest waned, as participation fell from a peak of 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

The third factor, according to the Democracy Campaign, was another side effect of Buckley v. Valeo, which ended limits on “issue ads” that aren’t coordinated with candidates and that don’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against a specific candidate. Such ads started popping up in Wisconsin elections as early as 1996. Candidates balked at spending limits when they knew they might have to respond to unlimited negative advertising by outside groups, the Democracy Campaign wrote.

Nonetheless, the 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, then-Milwaukee County Judge Diane Sykes and then-Milwaukee Municipal Judge Louis Butler, still used public financing in their campaigns. After Sykes won, one of her advisers complained that the spending limits “killed the drama of a truly exciting matchup.” However, the candidates themselves attributed the drama-free race to their own commitment to civility, with Butler reflecting that “media coverage … didn’t come because we weren’t being nasty to one another.”

That would change after the conservative Sykes became a federal appeals court judge and Doyle appointed the liberal Butler to replace her. Incensed by a product liability decision written by Butler, the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, started spending millions of dollars to elect conservatives to the high court.

In the first WMC-funded campaign in 2007, now-Justice Annette Ziegler defeated liberal attorney Linda Clifford at a cost more than four times the previous record of $1.4 million. The high price tag and flood of negative advertising spurred calls for reform.

Doyle proposed more extensive public financing for Supreme Court campaigns. Ziegler and Butler joined the rest of their colleagues in backing the concept, without signing on to the specifics of Doyle’s proposal. The bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but died in committee in the Republican-controlled Assembly.

Just as the justices feared, Butler’s 2008 bid for a full term sparked an even more expensive and mean-spirited contest than Ziegler’s 2007 race. Conservative Michael Gableman defeated Butler, the court’s first Black justice, in a $6 million campaign that drew accusations of racist and misleading advertising.

Diane Diel, then president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, warned lawmakers that “the infusion of such large amounts into a judicial campaign poses a threat to both judicial neutrality and public trust in the justice system.”

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a public financing bill, and Doyle signed it into law as the Impartial Justice Act in 2009. Abiding by the new law, both 2011 Supreme Court candidates, conservative Justice David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, accepted state grants and held to spending limits.

But the candidates’ treasuries accounted for less than a quarter of the $5.9 million spent in a campaign supercharged by controversy over Republican legislation that stripped most public-sector workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Anticipating that legal challenges eventually would reach the high court, conservative interests outspent unions on issue ads, $2.7 million to $1.6 million, in a race so close that Prosser won only after a recount.

Prosser’s victory maintained the conservative court majority that later upheld the bargaining legislation known as Act 10. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Legislature and Walker repealed the Impartial Justice Act and dismantled the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund shortly after the spring 2011 election.

Back to public cash?

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, is now drafting a bill to revive the Impartial Justice Act, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said one major difference in her proposal will be the size of the campaign grants. She’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates. Grants of $1 million in the primary and $3 million in the general election would exceed the campaign treasuries of any high court candidate before the 2023 race, which at the time set a national spending record of $50.4 million.

“It can’t be joke money or nobody will do it,” Roys said.

North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation system of paying for state supreme and appellate court campaigns met the same fate as Wisconsin’s original Impartial Justice Act in 2013, after Republicans won control of that state’s legislative and executive branches. That leaves New Mexico as the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

Instead of setting specific grant levels, New Mexico uses a formula based on the number of registered voters eligible to vote in each partisan primary or general election and on whether the election is contested or uncontested, with limited individual donations supplementing public grants. With no primary contests and four general election candidates for two contested seats, the state fund provided $1.1 million of the $1.2 million spent in 2022, up slightly from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Of the other 13 states that offer public campaign financing for at least some elections, 11 appoint high court justices; Michigan’s system applies only to gubernatorial races; and Minnesota’s system excludes Supreme Court candidates.

Both the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center advocate for public financing.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on “issue ads” or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose.

That outside spending has exceeded the cash spent directly by the candidates in 10 of the last 12 contested Supreme Court campaigns — by ratios as high as 4 to 1 in 2008 and 3 to 1 in 2011.

The only exceptions were two elections in which liberal incumbents trounced conservative circuit judges: then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and then-Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in 2015.

In Wisconsin’s first two multimillion-dollar Supreme Court contests, WMC’s political action committee (PAC) spent $2.2 million on issue ads backing Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million on issue ads backing Gableman in 2008, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates.

That triggered disputes over whether those two justices should step away from cases involving WMC. Ziegler refused to recuse herself from one 2007 case in which WMC had filed a friend-of-the-court brief, but a month later recused from another case brought partly by the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which had directly contributed the then-maximum $8,625 to her campaign.

Over the next two years, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and former Justice William Bablitch urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

While the Wisconsin justices considered those petitions, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a case in which coal company CEO Don Blankenship had spent $3 million supporting candidate Brent Benjamin’s 2004 West Virginia Supreme Court campaign — more than all of Benjamin’s other backers combined. Benjamin narrowly won and cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Blankenship’s company after refusing to recuse himself.

In their 5-4 decision tossing the state court’s ruling, the federal justices held that the circumstances were so extreme that they created “a serious risk of actual bias” that required Benjamin to recuse. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 2009 opinion added that few other cases would likely meet the same standard.

Against that background, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in 2010 to deny the LWV and Bablitch petitions and adopt verbatim the WMC and Realtors Association rules recommendations. Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Gableman, Prosser and Ziegler backed the new rules, while liberals Abrahamson and Bradley and moderate Justice Patrick Crooks dissented.

“Neither Justice Ziegler nor any other justice recused from this rulemaking process, despite the financial backing they had received from the parties requesting the rules,” the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recounted in a report.

Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

Also, because Supreme Court justices aren’t replaced when they recuse, the majority wrote, “involuntary recusal … has greater policy implications” than in lower courts because it changes how many and which justices are deciding a case. On Wisconsin’s closely divided seven-member high court, the withdrawal of a single justice from the majority bloc can often create a 3-3 deadlock.

Nonetheless, the State Democracy Research Initiative called the Wisconsin rules “unusual.” Former Justice Janine Geske agreed the change was a step backward.

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign,” according to the State Democracy Research Initiative. A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit. And most states leave recusal up to judges but don’t exclude contributions as a reason to do so.

Both recusal rules and outside campaign spending were in the spotlight again in 2015.

A case before the high court turned on a state law barring independent expenditure groups and issue ad organizations from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns. Act 10 had triggered an unprecedented recall against Walker. After the Republican governor’s victory in that 2012 recall election, several district attorneys jointly opened what was supposed to be a secret John Doe investigation into whether his campaign had illegally coordinated with groups that funded issue ads supporting him.

Some of the same organizations under scrutiny had also spent millions on issue ads in support of four conservative justices. But Prosser and Gableman refused to recuse themselves from the case challenging the probe. 

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the conservative justices’ decision not to recuse “a truly shocking situation.” By contrast, Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself because her son worked with one of the attorneys involved.

With its four-member conservative majority intact, the high court ruled the prohibition on coordinating with issue ad groups was unconstitutional, ending the investigation of Walker. Legislative Republicans promptly wrote the court’s decision into a 2015 campaign finance law, which Walker signed.

At the time, Wisconsin and Florida were the only states that allowed issue ads to be coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, said Jay Heck, executive director of the government reform group Common Cause Wisconsin. Weak coordination rules like Wisconsin’s “effectively allow wealthy special interests to bankroll candidates,” sidestepping limits on direct donations to campaigns and opening the door to “corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Elizabeth Shimek, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.

Strike two for recusal reform

Concern about Wisconsin’s lax recusal standards would only grow. In 2017, 54 retired judges — including Geske and Butler — petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules.

When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because the 2009 Impartial Justice Act had sliced contribution caps from $10,000 for individuals and $8,650 for political action committees to $1,000 for each. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the coordination rules for issue ads also had changed with the 2015 law and the John Doe decision that preceded it.

The retired judges asked for a rule that would require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

And to address the high court majority’s concern about recusal leaving the bench short, the retired judges called for a constitutional amendment that would allow Court of Appeals judges to sit in for justices who recuse themselves.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse, while Justice Rebecca Bradley argued that required recusal would disenfranchise the voters who elected a justice.

The issue could come up again now that liberal Jill Karofsky is chief justice. Speaking at a WisPolitics event in October, she said she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new recusal rules for the court.

State law sets recusal standards for some conflicts of interest, but not campaign contributions, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative.

The Brennan Center still advocates nationwide for the kind of recusal rules that the retired judges supported, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the center’s judiciary program. However, Keith added that he wasn’t aware of any state that requires litigants to disclose contributions in court.

Another Brennan Center recommendation urges independent review of recusal motions. As of 2016, Wisconsin was one of 35 states that allow high court justices to decide whether to recuse themselves, while Michigan was among the 15 states where someone else rules on recusal, according to the center’s most recent report on that question.

Power shift prompts recusal reversal 

Efforts to redraw legislative and congressional districts in this decade have spurred new recusal controversies — and turned the tables on which party backs recusal.

When Republicans took full control of the executive and legislative branches after the 2010 elections, they drew maps that guaranteed their party a comfortable majority in both the Assembly and Senate, even if state voters were split 50-50, in what experts called one of the nation’s most extreme examples of gerrymandering.

A decade later, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers clashed with legislative Republicans over how to redraw the maps after the 2020 Census, throwing the issue into the courts. With virtually no legal precedent, justices voted 4-3 to accept the GOP argument that court-approved maps should change as little as possible from the 2011 gerrymander.

Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, then a Milwaukee County judge, called those 2021 maps “rigged” during her successful 2023 high court race. Shortly after Protasiewicz took office, flipping the court to a liberal majority, voting rights groups filed suit to overturn the legislative maps.

Citing Protasiewicz’s previous comments and her heavy Democratic financial support — which amounted to 59% of her campaign treasury — Republicans demanded that she recuse from the redistricting case. However, neither state law nor judicial rules require judges to recuse because of their statements, as long as they have not specifically promised to rule in a certain way, the State Democracy Research Initiative noted.

Also, the $9.9 million Democratic contribution to Protasiewicz was proportionately less than the $2.6 million that the conservative Alliance for Reform dropped on issue ads supporting Rebecca Bradley in 2016, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s report pointed out. Bradley didn’t recuse when an alliance leader was a party to the original redistricting litigation.

Protasiewicz didn’t recuse either when justices voted 4-3 along ideological lines to reverse the least-change doctrine and order new maps.

But Protasiewicz declined to participate in one of the liberal-led court’s three otherwise unanimous rulings rejecting challenges to the 2021 congressional maps. Two more challenges are still pending.

If the issue reaches the high court again, the panel will include new Justice Susan Crawford, whose campaign last spring received $11.8 million from Democrats while Republicans were pumping $9.7 million into her conservative opponent Brad Schimel’s race.

Shining light on dark money

Although donations to parties and party donations to candidates are unlimited under the 2015 campaign finance law, they are publicly disclosed, along with the parties’ donors’ names. Issue ad and independent expenditure groups also aren’t limited in how much they take in or spend. And issue ad groups don’t have to report either donations or spending, a practice known as “dark money” for its lack of transparency.

Roys and Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, are working separately on campaign finance legislation that would set limits on donations to those organizations and require issue ad groups to disclose their donors, as parties and independent expenditure committees already do. Roys said her bill would focus specifically on judicial elections, while Rivera-Wagner’s bill would apply to all elections.

“Wisconsin is becoming the centerpiece for billionaires trying to influence elections,” Rivera-Wagner said. “This is just unacceptable.”

Both Roys and Rivera-Wagner said they would like to go further, but could be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate and union spending on issue ads and independent expenditures, and by the GOP legislative majority’s support for Wisconsin’s 2015 campaign finance law. Another federal court case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, struck down federal limits on donations to PACs.

In that legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin remains among the 22 states that elect justices.

Next: Should Supreme Court justices be appointed?

Wisconsin Watch reporter Brittany Carloni contributed to this report.

Unlimited donations, weak recusal rules led to record Wisconsin Supreme Court spending is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Gableman argued Protasiewicz shouldn't participate because, as a Supreme Court candidate in 2022, she issued a press release calling his investigation "disgraceful."

The post Janet Protasiewicz won’t recuse from Michael Gableman disciplinary case appeared first on WPR.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging five Wisconsin sheriffs’ practices of holding detainees in their jail for handoffs to ICE.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in September on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. It names sheriff’s offices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties as respondents. 

All five sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers —  nonbinding requests that a law enforcement agency assist ICE in taking custody of a person suspected of being in the country illegally by holding an inmate in a jail up to 48 hours past the person’s scheduled release. The local law enforcement agency can then pass the detainee directly to ICE officers.

The lawsuit argues that the detainers qualify as an arrest and that state statutes prohibit law enforcement agencies from making arrests based on ICE’s administrative warrants.

While most Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers, the lawsuit claims that five named offices received roughly a quarter of all detainers issued to Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices between January and July of this year. 

The sheriff’s offices have differing relationships with ICE. Brown and Sauk counties, for instance, also contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees in their jails, meaning a person could remain in the same jail after entering ICE custody. Kenosha County has no such contract, but it does participate in a federal grant program that partially reimburses local law enforcement agencies for incarceration costs in exchange for data on undocumented inmates. 

ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July of this year. Nearly 40% of those arrested were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.

In its initial petition, Voces de la Frontera urged the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case as a statewide concern. The court’s order, published on Wednesday afternoon, allows the plaintiffs to skip the lower courts entirely.

Liberal justices have a 4-3 majority on the court. At least four unnamed justices voted to immediately accept the case. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who often votes with conservatives, discussed the process in an opinion that did not specify his vote.

“When this court grants review in a case, we almost always let our grant order proceed without comment or dissent,” he wrote, later adding: “Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference.”

Voces de la Frontera has 30 days to file a brief in the case. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.

None of the five sheriffs’ offices named in the lawsuit immediately responded to requests for comment.

“We are reviewing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order and evaluating our next steps in this litigation,” Milwaukee attorney Sam Hall, who is representing all five sheriffs, wrote in an email Wednesday evening. “We are confident, however, that Wisconsin sheriffs who honor ICE detainers do so fully within the bounds of Wisconsin law and the federal legal framework governing immigration enforcement.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court to weigh sheriffs’ cooperation with ICE is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 14 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the first in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million.That figure was so high that it prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn that “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat exceeded $114.2 million.

That doesn’t include a legally questionable $30.3 million voter giveaway by billionaire Elon Musk.

The $144.5 million spent on one seat in Wisconsin was even more than the $100.8 million spent on all other state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022 combined.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors — and in some cases, the majority donors — to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office.

And the last two justices elected to Wisconsin’s highest court received most of their individual campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Wisconsin.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which the candidates’ ideologies overshadow their qualifications for an office that requires them to swear an oath to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. Reducing the influence of those factors would require changing the state constitution, state law or judicial rules of conduct. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion and public employee collective bargaining rights.
• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide in its electorate, state government and the high court itself, plus its role as an Electoral College swing state.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened limits on money in politics.
• Lax rules for when justices must recuse themselves from cases involving people and organizations that have spent huge sums to elect them.
• Holding court elections in the spring, which grew out of the state’s earliest yearnings for a nonpartisan judiciary but now eliminates competition against campaigns for most other major offices for donations and the public’s attention.

Some of those factors have pushed high court races in other states into the seven- or even eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has all of them.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Wisconsin Watch estimates the final total was $114.2 million — more than double the previous national record of $50.4 million for high court races — also set in this state, only two years earlier.

And that total doesn’t include the largest and most controversial expenditures of the spring campaign: Musk’s payments of $100 each to Wisconsin voters who signed a petition against “activist judges,” plus $1 million checks to three signers. Add in that $30.3 million effort and the race’s price tag jumps to $144.5 million.

The 2025 Supreme Court election was the fourth-most expensive campaign for any office in Wisconsin history, behind only the 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate contests and the 2022 governor’s race.

“As politics has grown more intense, more polarized and more expensive, high court election campaigns now resemble the worst of a presidential primary, complete with attack ads, dark money and presidential endorsements,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote in a March analysis. “All this hardly seems the best way to induce public trust in the courts.”

Since the era of multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns came to Wisconsin in 2007, candidates and special-interest groups have spent $217.2 million on 12 contested races, with the 2023 and 2025 elections accounting for three-quarters of that total, excluding the petition spending, based on information compiled by the campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s guaranteed to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, reported in July that she had raised $583,933 in the first six weeks of her campaign, ahead of now-Justice Susan Crawford’s record-breaking 2025 pace. By late August, Taylor’s campaign manager said the former Democratic state legislator had taken in more than $1 million.

After conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley announced she wouldn’t seek a second 10-year term, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar entered the race. Spending topped $1 million in the conservative Lazar’s successful 2022 bid to unseat incumbent Lori Kornblum. That was almost certainly Wisconsin’s second-most expensive appellate court race, behind a $1.6 million contest for another seat in the same southeastern district in 2021.

High costs for high courts

Although Wisconsin now outpaces every other state in Supreme Court campaign costs, it wasn’t an early leader in the national trend of divisive multimillion-dollar contests.

In its 2002 report, the Brennan Center called 2000 “a watershed year for fundraising and spending in state supreme court elections,” as the total raised by candidates nationwide leaped 61%, from $28.3 million in 1998 to $45.6 million in 2000, led by Alabama, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Much of that money was spent on “television advertising — especially by political parties and interest groups — that has grown increasingly negative and controversial, and in some cases fallen far beneath the level of dignity most Americans associate with their judicial system,” the report said.

That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.

Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

The low-key tone returned for the 2000 high court race. Justice Diane Sykes, a conservative appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and liberal challenger Louis Butler kept their pledges to run positive campaigns. Both scrupulously avoided commenting on any issues that might come before the court. They spent a total of $430,963, with both accepting public financing that limited their expenditures.

But that contest and the similarly civil 2003 race turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Butler to a vacant seat, Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers even if he couldn’t figure out which company was responsible.

That 4-2 ruling triggered a sharp reaction from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent an estimated $2.2 million to ensure conservative Annette Ziegler defeated liberal Linda Clifford in 2007. The race cost $5.8 million, with conservatives outspending liberals almost 2.5 to 1.

The following year’s contest promptly broke the new record as spending jumped to almost $6 million in conservative Michael Gableman’s successful bid to oust Butler. WMC dropped an estimated $1.8 million in support of Gableman as conservatives again outspent liberals, $3.2 million to $2.7 million.

Gableman’s victory created a solid conservative majority that controlled the court for the next 15 years. And after Republicans took control of the legislative and executive branches in 2011, they changed the product liability law to prevent future rulings like the 2005 lead paint case.

Similar story lines are playing out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. 

Musk is a prime example of that trend, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. At the same time that Musk was spending $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s losing Supreme Court bid, the billionaire’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model. The Tesla case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and could reach the high court that Musk unsuccessfully tried to influence.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas on issues like auto sales or product liability, instead pouring their money into television advertising that luridly accuses one candidate or the other of mishandling criminal cases as a lower court judge or attorney. Special interests see crime as “just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad,” Keith told Wisconsin Watch. But as the UW Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recently noted, “Only a tiny fraction of the state’s criminal cases ever get to the Supreme Court level, and in recent years such cases have made up only about a third of the court’s docket.”

Big donors are reflecting and reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” similar to the legislative and executive branches, said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly. And with frequent deadlocks between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, both sides are relying more on lawsuits than lawmaking, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit seeking to throw out more than 220,000 absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court tossed the suit, but only because Justice Brian Hagedorn broke ranks with fellow conservatives to join the body’s three liberals.

That razor-thin 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin’s electoral votes were decided by less than one percentage point. Schweber, Ramos and Heck said the same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested Supreme Court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away for most of those years. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Spending on high court contests is rising nationwide, hitting $100.8 million for the 68 justice seats decided in the 2021-22 cycle, according to the Brennan Center’s most recent report on the politics of judicial elections.

Electing a single Wisconsin Supreme Court justice cost more this year than operating the entire seven-member court for three years.

The 16-member Court of Appeals costs $12.9 million per year.

The high court and other statewide court services, including the CCAP system for looking up cases online, cost $40.7 million.

The state share of circuit court costs in all 72 counties, including salaries and benefits for all 261 trial judges as well as reserve judges and court reporters, totals $132 million.

*Each circle represents $1 million.

Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets

Graphic by Hongyu Liu

Parties crash in with cash

Efforts to keep partisan politics out of judicial campaigns date back to Wisconsin’s 1848 founding. In a provision that survives to this day, the first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, a move that some constitutional convention delegates hoped would discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates. That proved to be a vain hope, but it laid the groundwork for formally nonpartisan spring elections to evolve by 1891, according to the State Law Library.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer.  Other states that elect judges hold those elections in the fall, regardless of whether they are partisan or nonpartisan. That means they’re competing for donations with many other high-profile races, while Wisconsin’s high court races are often the biggest spring contests outside presidential primaries, noted Burden, Keith and Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin.

The spring timing took on national political significance this year, as the first major election in a battleground state after Trump’s November 2024 victory, Burden said. Musk “essentially connected the dots for voters” by turning the contest into a referendum on Trump’s policies, and by extension on Musk’s own role in slashing the federal government, Burden said. That strategy backfired so spectacularly that Musk said afterward he planned to cut back his future involvement in politics.

But it took more than a century for that partisan dynamic to evolve. Even as the total cost of high court campaigns soared into the millions, a relatively small percentage of the cash was coming from the parties, although the state Republican Party soon became the largest single donor to some conservative candidates.

The proportions started to change after 2015, when a campaign finance overhaul by the GOP-dominated Legislature allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates. While wealthy donors can contribute no more than $20,000 directly to a Supreme Court candidate (up from $1,000), they now can give as much as they want to a party, and the party then can donate all of that money to the candidate.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 to Bradley in the 2016 campaign (which was already under way when the new law took effect) to $423,615 to Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock in the next contested race in 2018. The GOP cash was more than 39% of the money raised by the conservative Screnock, who lost to liberal Rebecca Dallet.

Democrats still weren’t spending heavily on high court races until fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state party chair in 2019. The state, local and national parties poured $1.4 million into Jill Karofsky’s 2020 campaign, $9.9 million into Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 campaign and $11.8 million into Crawford’s 2025 campaign. The state party was the largest single donor to each justice, accounting for more than 59% of Protasiewicz’s treasury, just under half of Karofsky’s fundraising and more than one-third of Crawford’s cash.

That far outpaced Republican contributions of $328,586 to then-incumbent Kelly in 2020 and $900,461 to his unsuccessful comeback bid in 2023. The GOP didn’t start to catch up until this year, when it threw $9.7 million into Schimel’s losing campaign, representing more than 61% of the former attorney general’s war chest.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans by $23.2 million to $11.7 million, or nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

State Democratic and Republican party leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But some GOP activists blamed party chair Brian Schimming for the conservative losses in 2023 and 2025. That led to a study that called for an even greater party role in high court elections, while discouraging advertising by other outside groups like Musk’s PACs.

Special interests spend right and left

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Nearly all of that spending fell along ideological lines. In addition to the parties, conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

Of all the special-interest spending, only $38.3 million, or 24%, went into candidates’ campaign treasuries from 2007 through 2025, $25.8 million on the liberal side and $12.5 million on the conservative side. The rest was spent directly by outside groups, typically on advertising that is usually outside the candidates’ control. That money mainly fell into two categories: independent expenditures and “issue ads,” both operating under rules that were significantly loosened by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Campaign ads funded by independent expenditures clearly state which candidates they support or oppose. Like the campaigns themselves, political action committees making independent expenditures must file reports with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, disclosing how much they received and spent and who their donors were. Unlike campaigns, they can take money from corporations and unions, and anyone can give them unlimited contributions.

By contrast, “issue ads” try to sway voters under the guise of expressing concern about a particular issue, but without using specific phrases like “vote for” or “vote against.” Issue ad groups aren’t required to reveal how much they spent or who gave them cash. Their funding is often called “dark money” because it’s hidden from the light of public disclosure.

Because of the way issue ad spending is reported, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was unable to distinguish the exact amount spent on issue ads in the Supreme Court race from similar spending that targeted the simultaneous campaign for state superintendent of public instruction. Based on preliminary data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center, Wisconsin Watch estimates $13.9 million was aimed at the Supreme Court contest.

Using that estimate and previous Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates, issue ads accounted for most of the special-interest spending in eight consecutive Supreme Court contests from 2007 through 2018. For the entire 2007-2025 period, issue ad spending totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals. 

By contrast, most of the special-interest money went into independent expenditures in the last four high court campaigns. Liberal groups spent slightly more than conservative organizations in the 2019, 2020 and 2023 races, but this year, Schimel supporters outspent Crawford backers, $33.3 million to $18.1 million. From 2007 through 2025, independent expenditures totaled $83.5 million — $47.6 million for conservatives and $35.4 million for liberals, plus almost $450,000 on candidates eliminated in the 2023 primary.

Musk’s petition giveaways don’t fit neatly into either the independent expenditure or issue ad categories — and whether they fit into campaign finance law at all is a subject of litigation. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed a civil suit against Musk, accusing him of violating Wisconsin’s election bribery law.

Donors change tune to 'Non-Wisconsin'

Out-of-state donors like Musk didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign figures show. During that time, the highest proportions of out-of-state donations were:

• Almost 32% to Gableman in 2008.
• More than 12% to Ziegler in 2007.
• Almost 12% to liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who narrowly lost to then-Justice David Prosser in 2011, after Republicans stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public-sector employees.

Out-of-state donations to conservative candidates remained below 10% as out-of-state donations to liberals rose to about 23% each for Hagedorn’s opponent Lisa Neubauer in 2019 and Karofsky in 2020.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and left each state to regulate abortions. The decision revived an 1849 Wisconsin law that was interpreted as banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother.

As Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate, her 2023 campaign took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin, while Kelly’s $340,405 in out-of-state money represented just one-eighth of his individual donations.

Similarly, Crawford, a Dane County judge who had represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney fighting a different abortion law, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors for her 2025 campaign, hitting a likely unprecedented 69% of individual contributions.

Crawford took in more from individual out-of-state donors alone than all liberal candidates from 2007 through 2023 had received from all individual contributors combined. By contrast, Schimel’s $1.1 million from other states amounted to less than one-fifth of his individual donations.

In July, after Crawford was elected but before she took her seat, the liberal-controlled court voted 4-3 along ideological lines to overturn the 19th-century law. 

Over the last 12 campaigns, out-of-state donors contributed $20.7 million to Wisconsin Supreme Court races, all but about $1 million of that in the last two races. Liberal candidates took in almost $19 million from outside Wisconsin, more than 10 times the nearly $1.8 million that went to conservative candidates. In its review of the 2025 campaign, the state GOP called for a greater effort to attract out-of-state dollars for conservatives.

From the parties’ perspective, Democrats have beaten Republicans at their own game, triumphing under rules largely crafted by GOP lawmakers and conservative judges. Now Republicans hope to win back their advantage with more of the same.

But for reformers, the most pressing issue is how to stop the competition for ever-greater spending and reduce the influence of big money on the high court.

Next: Could new laws and recusal rules stem the tide of Supreme Court campaign spending?

Because of the use of scrolling graphics, the republication button is not available for this story. Reach out to Matthew DeFour at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org if you would like to republish.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have drawn an ‘obscene’ amount of spending. Here’s why and what can be done about it. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A woman is detained by federal agents after exiting a hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on Sept. 3, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a lawsuit from the immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera against the authority of the state’s county sheriffs to hold people in county jails based on detainers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

The lawsuit from Voces will be immediately heard by the Supreme Court as an original action, meaning it won’t begin at the circuit court level and work its way up to the Supreme Court. The case comes as jurisdictions across the country wrestle with the effects of the Trump administration’s increased immigration enforcement and the level to which local law enforcement should participate.  

Courts in New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Montana have previously ruled that state law bars local law enforcement officers from complying with federal immigration detainers. A state law in Illinois prohibits local cooperation with federal immigration agents. 

Here in Wisconsin, more than a dozen county sheriffs offices have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE that grant sheriff’s deputies some immigration enforcement authority, including the ability to question people in custody about their immigration status and hold people in jail under federal detainers. 

The Dodge County sheriff maintains an agreement with the federal government to hold many types of federal detainees in the department’s jail — including immigrants. That agreement includes sheriff’s deputies transporting detained migrants to and from a controversial ICE facility in Broadview, Ill. 

Some departments in the state, including Madison and Milwaukee, have explicitly said they won’t cooperate with federal immigration efforts. 

Voces’ lawsuit argues that state law does not give Wisconsin law enforcement officers the authority to conduct civil immigration enforcement. 

In accepting the case, the Court said it would consider whether Wisconsin sheriffs have the authority to arrest people as part of a civil immigration enforcement action and how 287(g) agreements affect the application of state law. 

Departing from usual practice in which state Supreme Court decisions to accept cases are unsigned, conservative Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented from the decision to hear the case. 

In a written opinion, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote Supreme Court rules state it takes four justices to agree to accept an original action and that normally these decisions are unsigned to prevent observers from inferring if the justices hold pre-established views on an issue. He added that just because some justices publicly dissented, that does not reveal how every justice voted in the decision to accept the case. 

“The public may begin to infer that if a justice does not publicly dissent to an order granting review in a case, that justice has joined the order taking the case,” he wrote. “That assumption would be unwarranted. Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference. A grant order simply means the requisite number of justices voted to grant a petition — in this case, four —nothing more.”

Under Wednesday’s order, Voces has 30 days to file a brief in the case.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler addresses the Wisconsin Judicial Conference Wednesday. (Screenshot | WisEye)

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler misquoted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a recent dissent, stating that the country’s highest court said the opposite of what it ruled in a 2023 redistricting decision. Ziegler’s opinion pushed back against  the state Supreme Court’s decision to appoint a pair of three-judge panels to decide challenges to Wisconsin’s  congressional maps. 

On Nov. 26, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that two lawsuits alleging the state’s congressional maps are unconstitutional should be heard by the panels because of a 2011 law requiring that action. The Court’s four liberal justices were partially joined in the decision by conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, who wrote in a concurring opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s decision to appoint the six judges who will sit on the panels. 

In a dissenting opinion written by Ziegler and joined by Justice Rebecca Bradley, the two conservatives argued the decision was made “in furtherance of delivering partisan, political advantage to the Democratic Party.”

But Ziegler wrote in her opinion the U.S. Supreme Court had recently affirmed that “the role of state courts in congressional redistricting is ‘exceedingly limited.’” 

Ziegler cited the Court’s 2023 decision in Moore v. Harper — which was about the North Carolina Supreme Court’s authority to weigh in on congressional redistricting. The phrase “exceedingly limited” does not appear once in the decision.  In that case, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court found the opposite of what Ziegler claimed.

“State courts retain the authority to apply state constitutional restraints when legislatures act under the power conferred upon them by the Elections Clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. 

The misquote was first reported by Slate and Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy. 

The day after the decision was published, the opinion was withdrawn from the state court’s website and replaced with a different version. The change wasn’t publicly acknowledged by the Court and only removes the quotation marks around the phrase “exceedingly limited.” The correction does not change Ziegler’s mischaracterization of the decision in Moore v. Harper.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Members of the U.S. Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies respond to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The man accused in the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members in the District of Columbia pleaded not guilty in his Tuesday arraignment hearing, during which he appeared virtually from a hospital bed.

U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died as a result of her injuries, and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in the hospital with severe wounds. 

D.C. Superior Court Magistrate Judge Renee Raymond denied bond for 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who officials allege drove across the United States to the district from his residence in Washington state. The guard members were attacked while on duty in a downtown neighborhood blocks from the White House.

“He came across the country 3,000 miles, armed with a specific purpose in mind,” Judge Raymond said in her reasoning for denying him bond. “The government’s case is exceedingly strong.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed charges Tuesday for first-degree murder while armed; possession of a firearm; and assault with the intent to kill. 

Lakanwal’s next court date is Jan. 14.

“The nature and circumstances of the instant offense, the strength of the government’s case, and the sheer terror that resulted, that continues to animate because of his actions, leads me to conclude that no conditions or combination of conditions, will reasonably ensure the safety of the community,” Raymond said.

West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey wrote on social media Tuesday that Wolfe “remains in critical condition but is stable.”

“Doctors and the family are optimistic about his current progress and note that he has responded to some basic requests such as a thumbs up sign and wiggling his toes,” Morrisey said.

Troops in the district

The West Virginia National Guard members shot last week are among the 2,000 troops stationed in the district since August, after President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency.” 

Republican governors have offered to send their states’ reserves of National Guard members to the nation’s capital. A federal judge last month found the president’s deployment of troops to the district illegal. 

Lakanwal was granted asylum this year after he came to the United States through a special humanitarian program for Afghanistan allies who served along American forces and had to flee the country after the Taliban took it over following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021. 

The shooting that took place on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday has resulted in Trump expanding his immigration crackdown to include a halt to asylum applications, as well as increased scrutiny on visa applications from Afghan nationals. 

“In the wake of last week’s atrocity, it is more important than ever to finish carrying out the president’s mass deportation operation,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at Monday’s press briefing. “They must go back to their home countries.”

Translator appears for Lakanwal

During Tuesday’s arraignment, Lakanwal seemed to thrash around in pain in his hospital bed. A translator also appeared virtually for Lakanwal. 

Lakanwal’s lawyer raised concerns about U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro, a former Fox News host, holding future press conferences, warning that could harm a “free and fair trial” for Lakanwal. Pirro held a press conference on Thanksgiving morning to discuss the shooting.

“The government at their own peril … continue to taint a potential jury pool against Mr. Lakanwal as a result of their press conferences,” he said.

Department of Defense press secretary Kingsley Wilson said during a Tuesday briefing at the Pentagon that all National Guard members in the district would be armed. 

Following last week’s shooting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would request an additional 500 National Guard members be deployed in the district. 

It’s unclear if that directive would violate a federal judge’s order that found the August deployment unlawful. The federal judge stayed her Nov. 20 order for three weeks to give the administration time to either appeal or remove the troops. The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal after the shooting in the district.

Ashley Murray contributed to this report.

At a time when states across the country are locked in redistricting battles aimed at swaying the balance of power in Congress, two lawsuits attempting to redraw Wisconsin's congressional map are using a process that is anything but ordinary.

The post Lawsuits calling for new Wisconsin congressional map are in the hands of 6 county judges. Now what? appeared first on WPR.

Prisoners look out of their cell as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours the Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26, 2025. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice acknowledged in a court filing that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made the call to continue removals of Venezuelans to a brutal Salvadoran prison, despite a federal judge’s order to stop the deportations.

The Tuesday filing noted that Noem was advised by top officials at the Justice Department she did not need to comply with the March 15 judicial order to halt the deportations because it had been issued after the flights took off. The Venezuelan nationals were deported under an obscure wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.

“After receiving that legal advice, Secretary Noem directed that the AEA detainees who had been removed from the United States before the Court’s order could be transferred to the custody of El Salvador,” according to the DOJ filing. “That decision was lawful and was consistent with a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s order.”

Noem’s decision sent 137 Venezuelan men to a mega-prison for months until the Venezuelan government could broker a prison swap with El Salvador and the United States to have the men returned. 

In an emergency March 15 order, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said the planes carrying the Venezuelans had to return to the United States.

They did not have the opportunity to challenge their removal, which was a violation of their due process rights, the American Civil Liberties Union has argued in its case against the Trump administration. 

Tuesday’s filing represents a shift in legal strategy from the administration, which had initially argued that because Boasberg’s order was verbal and not written, his temporary restraining order carried no weight. 

Contempt probe

The filing comes after Boasberg resumed a contempt investigation to identify the Trump administration officials involved in authorizing the Venezuelans’ removals.

Last week, Boasberg ordered the administration to submit filings on how to proceed with the contempt inquiry.

“I certainly intend to find out what happened that day,” Boasberg said last week.

Tuesday’s filing argued that contempt proceedings are not needed and that “the Government maintains that its actions did not violate the Court’s order.”

The ACLU, which is representing the deported men, in its filing on the contempt issue urged Boasberg to request testimony from nine current and former officials from the Homeland Security and Justice departments. 

The ACLU also said the government should identify “all individuals involved in the decision… regardless of whether they were the ultimate decision-maker or had direct input into the decision, as well as all those with knowledge of the decision-making process.”

Once those people had been identified, Boasberg could determine in what order testimony should be gathered.

Democrats and pro-democracy organizations held a rally Oct. 16 to call for the creation of an independent redistricting commission. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an order for two judicial panels to hear arguments against Wisconsin's current U.S. House maps. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a pair of three-judge panels to hear arguments in two lawsuits challenging the state’s congressional maps. 

The challenges to the maps come as fights play out all over the country over the dividing lines of congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections. After Texas legislators worked to draw Democratic seats out of existence at the behest of President Donald Trump and a number of other Republican-led states followed suit, California voters elected to temporarily undo their state’s independent redistricting commission and allow Democratic leaders to wipe out Republican-leaning seats. 

Similar efforts have followed to varying degrees of success in states including Arkansas, Indiana and Virginia. 

Wisconsin’s political maps have been at the center of its divided government for more than a decade, with the Supreme Court undoing the partisan gerrymander in the state Legislature two years ago. 

Since then, the focus has turned to Wisconsin’s congressional maps, where Republicans control six of the state’s eight districts. More than once, the Supreme Court has declined to hear cases that request the Court directly take up challenges to the congressional maps. 

A lobbying effort in the state is also ongoing to establish an independent, nonpartisan process for creating the state’s legislative and congressional maps. 

On Tuesday, the Court ruled that the challenges to the maps must follow a 2011 law, passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, which requires that challenges to the state’s congressional districts be heard by a panel of three circuit court judges. 

Republicans had argued that law shouldn’t apply in this case. In a 5-2 decision, in which the court’s four liberal justices were joined by conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, the Court ruled the law applies and the panels should be created.

In the majority decision, the Court’s liberals also appointed the panels — of which all the members were appointed by Gov. Tony Evers or endorsed liberal Justice Susan Crawford in this spring’s election. 

Hagedorn dissented on the appointment of the panels, arguing the panel members should’ve been appointed randomly. 

“Given the nature of this case and the statute’s implicit call for geographic diversity and neutrality, a randomly-selected panel and venue would be a better way to fulfill the statutory mandate,” Hagedorn wrote. “To be clear, I am not suggesting the judicial panel will fail to do its job with integrity and impartiality. But this approach is an odd choice in the face of a statute so clearly designed to deter litigants from selecting their preferred venue and judge.” 

Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented from the decision, arguing the majority chose the judges on the panel to further the goals of the Democratic party. 

In several previous lawsuits over political maps, Bradley and Ziegler have issued rulings that benefited the Republican party or further entrenched the partisan gerrymander that has allowed the Republican party to retain control of the Legislature for 15 years. 

“Hand picking circuit court judges to perform political maneuvering is unimaginable,” Ziegler wrote. “Yet, my colleagues persist and appear to do this, all in furtherance of delivering partisan, political advantage to the Democratic Party.” 

On Tuesday, Crawford and Justice Janet Protasiewicz also issued orders denying requests from Republican members of Congress and GOP voters that they recuse themselves from the redistricting cases. Since the two justices’ elections in recent years, the state’s Republicans have regularly accused the pair of making statements on the campaign trail that show pre-judgment of cases involving the state’s political maps. 

“The Congressmen’s recusal theories are overbroad, impracticable, and rife with unintended consequences,” Crawford wrote. “Individuals and organizations have the right to contribute to judicial campaigns and to express their beliefs about the effect judicial elections will have on issues of importance to them. Demanding that a justice recuse from a case because third parties who made campaign contributions have expressed their views on high-profile issues improperly implies that the judge had endorsed or adopted such views. This insinuation is inappropriate, particularly where the judge has expressly disclaimed such an endorsement, and undermines judicial impartiality. Further, it would chill protected speech and undermine this court’s central role of deciding cases of statewide importance.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has appointed judicial panels to hear lawsuits challenging the state’s congressional districts, a move that could lead to the Republican-leaning map being redrawn ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The post Wisconsin congressional map lawsuits move forward as state Supreme Court appoints panels appeared first on WPR.

A sign explaining delays in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the government shutdown is displayed at a Sprouts grocery store in Bountiful, Utah, on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025. (McKenzie Romero/Utah News Dispatch)

The Trump administration will release full benefits for most participants in the nation’s major federal nutrition program within 24 hours of the reopening of the federal government, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson said Wednesday. 

Many of the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to help afford groceries have faced uncertainty for weeks about their November benefits, which President Donald Trump and other top administration officials said could not be paid while the government was shut down. 

A USDA spokesperson answered an afternoon email from States Newsroom inquiring about when benefits would restart with a single sentence:

“Upon the government reopening, within 24 hours for most States,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Politico first reported the department’s 24-hour timeline.

While the federal government funds SNAP benefits, states are responsible for their administration, meaning an array of different processes across the country. 

The U.S. House was set to vote Wednesday evening to clear a bill to reopen the government after a record 43-day shutdown, after the Senate acted earlier this week. Trump is expected to sign it into law as early as Wednesday night. 

The enactment of the bill — and the subsequent renewal of federal payments — would resolve a dizzying weekslong saga over SNAP that placed the roughly 1 in 8 Americans who use the program in the middle of a political and legal battle playing out across every level of the federal judiciary. 

Since the shutdown began Oct. 1, the USDA has reversed its own position, the U.S. Supreme Court paused lower court orders and Trump himself expressed contradicting views.

In the most recent chapter, USDA said it would authorize states to pay 65% of benefits for November, and the Supreme Court paused until Thursday night lower court orders compelling full payments. 

The department had previously told a Rhode Island federal court it could take weeks or even months for beneficiaries to receive the partial allotments and the administration continued to fight rulings to immediately release full funding, even as the shutdown crept toward its conclusion.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

The U.S. Supreme Court has extended through Thursday a pause on lower courts’ orders that the Trump administration authorize a full month of benefits for a food assistance program that 1 in 8 Americans use to buy groceries.

A brief, unsigned order published Tuesday evening also said the full court would decide on the administration’s request to block court orders that the U.S. Department of Agriculture release full November benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. 

The case was presented to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said she would have dismissed the case and denied the request for an administrative stay. Jackson was appointed to the high court by President Joe Biden.

The order adds another wrinkle to a case that was already the object of a weekslong tug-of-war over how the program should operate during the government shutdown.

The shutdown could end before the stay expires. The U.S. Senate passed a bill Monday to reopen the government, and the House is expected to pass it Wednesday. President Donald Trump has said he supports the measure and will likely sign it before the end of the day Thursday.

Trump and administration officials have maintained they were not authorized to release November SNAP benefits during the shutdown.

A Rhode Island federal judge ordered the USDA on Thursday to release full benefits for November. The department sent states a memo authorizing those payments Friday morning, then appealed to the Supreme Court on Friday evening to have the district court’s order overturned.

At the same time, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s order.

In the face of often contradicting administrative guidance and court orders, some states began processing full benefits for November, while others have yet to release them.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a challenge to a landmark ruling protecting same-sex marriage equality. The rainbow flag of the gay pride movement and the flag of the United States | Getty Images

The United States Supreme Court has declined to revisit the 2015 landmark ruling that gave same-sex couples marriage equality, a failure for former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis.

Davis made national headlines in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to several same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs. With the help of conservative legal firm Liberty Counsel, Davis has tried to avoid paying $100,000 as ordered by a federal jury to one of the couples she refused, David Ermold and David Moore. She ultimately tried to use that appeal to challenge Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that required states to license same-sex marriages.

The nation’s highest court on Monday said it will not hear the challenge.

Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman who represents Davis, said he “will continue to work to overturn Obergefell.”

“Davis was jailed, hauled before a jury, and now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings,” Staver said. “By denying this petition, the High Court has let stand a decision to strip a government defendant of their immunity and any personal First Amendment defense for their religious expression.”

Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lambda Legal, a pro-LGBTQ+ advocacy law firm, called the case “frivolous” in celebrating its defeat.

“This is a victory not only for the LGBTQ+ community, but for everyone who believes in our Constitution and the rule of law. The court’s decision reaffirms a simple fact: equal protection of the law applies to all, not just some,” Jennings said in a statement. “This frivolous case now belongs in the trash bin of history.”

Jenny Pizer, Lambda Legal’s senior director of strategic initiatives said the decision to not hear the case by the Supreme Court “rightly leaves marriage equality crystal clear and undisturbed.”

Pizer said LGBTQ+ people and their families “still need vigilance and protection,” though.

“We secured the freedom to marry for same-sex couples over a decade ago in our landmark 2015 Supreme Court victory, Obergefell v. Hodges, thanks to the powerful stories of thousands of couples and their families throughout the country, including in our many court cases,” Pizer said. “The fundamental rights of liberty and equal protection that the court affirmed back then remain essential for all American families today.”

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.