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The day after the decision was published, the opinion was withdrawn from the state court’s website and replaced with a different version.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.
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.”
State Rep. Matt Morgan, R-Richmond, surveys a map of proposed new congressional districts in Texas, as Democratic lawmakers, who left the state to deny Republicans the opportunity to redraw the state's 38 congressional districts, began returning to the Texas Capitol in Austin on Aug. 20, 2025. REUTERS/Sergio Flores
Texas cannot use its new congressional map for the 2026 election and will instead need to stick with the lines passed in 2021, a three-judge panel ruled Tuesday.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the ruling. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Brown ordered that the 2026 congressional election “shall proceed under the map that the Texas Legislature enacted in 2021.” The case will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but time is short: Candidates only have until Dec. 8 to file for the upcoming election.
The decision is a major blow for Republicans, in Texas and nationally, who pushed through this unusual mid-decade redistricting at the behest of President Donald Trump. They were hoping the new map would yield control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts — up from the 25 they currently hold — and help protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House.
The map cleared the GOP-controlled Legislature in August and was quickly signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott. Several advocacy groups sued over the new district lines, saying lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black and Hispanic Texans and drew racially gerrymandered maps. Over the course of a nine-day hearing in El Paso earlier this month, they aimed to convince the judges that it was in voters’ best interest to shelve the new map until a full trial could be held.
It was not immediately clear if the state still has a legal path to restoring the new map in time for 2026. Unlike most federal lawsuits, which are heard by a single district judge and then appealed to a circuit court, voting rights lawsuits are initially heard by two district judges and one circuit judge, and their ruling can only be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision comes 10 days into the monthlong period when candidates can sign up for the March primary. The filing deadline is Dec. 8.
This is just the opening gambit in what promises to be a yearslong legal battle over Texas’ congressional map. A lawsuit over the state’s 2021 redistricting — including its state legislative and education board seats — went to trial earlier this summer and remains pending before the same three-judge panel. The judges have indicated they may want to see how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a major voting rights case before issuing their full ruling on Texas’ maps.
But for Trump, and many of his Republican supporters in Texas, the short-term goal of having this map for the 2026 election was as important as the long game.
“I’m convinced that if Texas does not take this action, there is an extreme risk that [the] Republican majority will be lost,” Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, said on the floor of the state Senate before the new map passed. “If it does, the next two years after the midterm, there will be nothing but inquisitions and impeachments and humiliation for our country.”
As Democrats across the country devise ways to match Republican redistricting efforts, a long-standing battle over congressional maps has been quietly progressing in one of the nation’s most competitive swing states.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is taking up two gerrymandering lawsuits challenging the state’s congressional maps after years of back-and-forth litigation on the issue. Over the summer, it appeared redistricting efforts would go nowhere before the midterms; the state’s high court in June rejected similar lawsuits.
But liberal groups have found new ways to challenge the maps that the state Supreme Court appears open to considering. This time, plaintiffs are requesting the court appoint a three-judge panel to hear their partisan gerrymandering case, and a new group has stepped into the fray with a lawsuit that argues a novel anticompetitive gerrymandering claim.
The jury is still out on whether those rulings will come in time for 2026.
“Could they be? Yes. Will they be? That’s hard to say,” said Janine Geske, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice.
Some developments in the cases in October indicate that the gerrymandering fight in Wisconsin is far from over.
The justices have allowed Wisconsin’s six Republican congressmen to join the cases as defendants. The congressmen are now looking to force two of the court’s liberal justices, Janet Protasiewicz and Susan Crawford, to recuse themselves from the cases. Both justices were endorsedby the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; Protasiewicz criticized the maps on the campaign trail, and Crawford’s donors billed her as a justice who could help Democrats flip seats.
Some are unsure why the Republican congressmen are entering the fight now, months after the liberal groups filed the new cases.
“They took their time to even seek intervention, and now they’re seeking recusal, and now they’re trying to hold up the appointment process. I’m sure their goal is to try to throw sand in the gears of this litigation,” said Abha Khanna, a plaintiff attorney in Bothfeld v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, the partisan gerrymandering case requesting that the courts appoint a three-judge panel to review the maps.
The offices and campaigns of the six Republican congressmen did not respond to requests for comment.
Khanna said her team filed the lawsuit with enough time to potentially redraw the maps, despite the congressmen’s recent actions.
“There certainly is time to affect the 2026 elections,” she said.
This lawsuit lays out a more familiar partisan gerrymandering argument, in which lawyers say Wisconsin’s congressional maps discriminate against Democratic voters. Six of the state’s eight House seats are filled by Republicans, even though statewide elections have been close partisan races. Sens. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin — a Republican and Democrat, respectively — won their most recent statewide elections by a percentage point or less, while Gov. Tony Evers kept his office by more than 3 percentage points in 2022 (Evers will not be seeking reelection in 2026).
The plaintiffs believe they ultimately have a strong case because the state’s high court ruled in 2023 that the “least change” principle — which dictated the 2021 maps to be drawn “consistent with existing boundaries” of the 2011 maps — should no longer be used as primary criteria in redistricting. The state legislative maps were changed. But the federal district maps were not.
In effect, the maps that were proposed by Evers in 2021 continued on the legacy of Republican gerrymandering, Khanna said. The lawsuit, filed in July, requests the appointment of a three-judge panel to hear the case, after the state Supreme Court in June rejected the plaintiffs’ petition.
“It’s a judicially created metric that violates the principles of the (Wisconsin) constitution,” Khanna said. “This can be decided without any fact-finding at all. The court can decide it as a matter of law, and then we can proceed quickly to a remedial map.”
Not everyone involved is so optimistic that this will be resolved quickly. Jeff Mandell, a plaintiff attorney in the redistricting lawsuit alleging that the maps are illegally too favorable to incumbents — a new argument that hasn’t been tested in the state — said it is “exceedingly unlikely” that new maps could be drawn in time for the midterm elections. Primary candidates must file their nomination papers to the elections commission by June 1, 2026. The final district lines must be in place by spring for candidates to circulate their papers among the right voters.
“If we don’t have maps by the end of March or so, it’s very, very difficult to run the election next November,” Mandell said.
Even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that the current maps are unconstitutional, the most likely scenario would punt the task of redrawing to partisan officeholders, he added — a process that could hinder easy consensus and potentially draw out the timeline for months.
Mandell’s lawsuit is arguably facing a bigger hurdle as it attempts to make the case that the districts are drawn in a way that makes it extremely difficult for challengers to have a real chance.
The exception is Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, where Rep. Derrick Van Orden has won by fewer-than-four-point margins and is currently facing three challengers, including the well-funded Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who lost to him in 2024.
The median margin of victory in Wisconsin’s remaining congressional districts is about 29 percentage points, according to a NOTUS review.
“Thirty points is not something you can overcome by having a really good candidate, it’s not something you can overcome by having a great campaign plan and executing it flawlessly, it’s not something you can overcome when there’s a swing election,” Mandell said.
The next months will prove whether the incumbent argument is convincing to Wisconsin’s justices, who have heard their share of redistricting cases.
This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
Democrats and pro-democracy organizations held a rally Thursday to call for the creation of an independent redistricting commission. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
A group of pro-democracy organizations held a rally, attended by Democratic legislators, Thursday afternoon outside the state Capitol to push for the creation of an independent commission tasked with drawing the state’s legislative maps.
The renewed push for permanently taking the construction of Wisconsin’s political maps out of the hands of politicians comes amid a national debate about gerrymandering and as the state’s Democrats are outlining what state government will look like if they hold power in all three branches after next year’s midterm elections.
Across the country, Democrats — who have for years been the party calling for a nonpartisan process for drawing political maps — are weighing the merits of “unilaterally disarming” by putting the drawing of maps in the hands of independent bodies in blue states while Republicans are redrawing maps in red states such as Texas in an explicit effort to hold on to their slim congressional majority.
Next month, voters in California will weigh in on a referendum asking if the Democrats in control of the state’s government can temporarily bypass the independent map-drawing commission and redraw maps to benefit Democrats as a counter to the Republican effort in Texas.
State Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), a candidate in the Democratic primary for governor, told the Wisconsin Examiner after the Thursday rally that Wisconsin Democrats should push for a permanent resolution to the state’s map debate because a more effective counter to increasing authoritarianism than tit-for-tat congressional gerrymanders is creating systems that allow government to be more responsive to voters’ wishes.
“Here in Wisconsin, what the people want are permanent fair maps, and that means keeping the decision of redistricting out of politicians’ hands and within a group of nonpartisan folks,” she said. “If we’re going to have representative democracy, that’s what we need. But we also have to remember to be proactive, and that’s why the permanent fair maps matter. And if we’re going to be responsive to an eroding democracy, that’s also how we should be empowering the people …”
After Thursday’s rally, the advocates — including members of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and Fair Maps Wisconsin Coalition — were going into the Capitol to deliver the draft of their plan to legislators.
Under the plan, the state Department of Administration would be responsible for managing the selection of 18 independent redistricting commission members (15 acting members and three reserve members).
The membership would be divided evenly between representatives of the two major political parties and unaffiliated. Members would not be allowed to hold other public offices and could not be a family member of a public office holder. Lobbyists and anyone who has donated more than $2,000 to a candidate for office in a year over the previous five years wouldn’t be allowed to sit on the commission.
After the DOA selects a pool of 240 applicants, the majority and minority leaders of both legislative chambers would be allowed to strike down a certain number of candidates.
The IRC would be required to hold public hearings while it deliberates on the maps. Approval of final maps would have to come through a two-thirds majority vote that includes votes from members representing the interests of both major parties and the independents.
The plan includes a provision for members to rank proposed maps if such a “multi-partisan agreement” can’t be reached.
Any proposed maps from the commission would need to still be approved by the Legislature and governor within 30 days. If maps aren’t approved, the Legislature or governor must provide a written explanation to the commission and the commission would have 15 days to respond or provide new maps.
The Legislature and governor would have three attempts to approve maps before Aug. 15 of a redistricting year. If maps can’t be codified by then, anyone in the state would have the authority to file a lawsuit with the Wisconsin Supreme Court to adopt a commission-proposed map.
Democrats said at the rally that they want to make sure the commission is crafted in a way that prevents meddling after the fact from politicians. Redistricting commissions in states such as Iowa and Ohio have been undermined once their proposals were subjected to the political process.
Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) said Republican legislators like the Iowa-style commission because if they vote down the commission’s proposals three times, the map-drawing authority returns to the Legislature.
“They figured out the flaw in that model,” he said. “That is why we need a Wisconsin model, a Wisconsin model that works for all of us.”
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