Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 30. Sunrise is 7:08, and sunset is 4:21, for 9 hours, 13 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1947, the first TV station in Wisconsin, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, is established. The seventeenth television station in the country, WTMJ-TV is the first in the Midwest.

We live in time when past judicial decisions are discarded, at the federal and state level. It should not surprise, although it still does, that prior legislation and prior court rulings to it are again set aside. And so, as one would have expected since July, Act 10 has been ruled unconstitutional:

Judge Jacob Frost ruled that Act 10, passed by the state Legislature’s Republican majority in 2011 and signed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in his first year in office, was unconstitutional in making some public safety workers exempt from the law’s limits on unions but excluding other workers with similar jobs from those protections.

The ruling essentially confirmed Frost’s ruling on July 3, 2024, when he rejected motions by the state Legislature’s Republican leaders to dismiss the 2023 lawsuit challenging Act 10.

In that ruling, Frost declared that state Capitol Police, University of Wisconsin Police, and state conservation wardens were “treated unequally with no rational basis for that difference” because they were not included in the exemption that Act 10 had created for other law enforcement and public safety employees.

For that reason, the law’s categories of general and public safety employees, and its public safety employee exemption, were unconstitutional, Frost wrote then.

Frost reiterated that ruling Monday. “Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines ‘public safety employee,’” Frost wrote. “It is that definition which is unconstitutional.”

In addition, the judge rejected the suggestion that Act 10 could remain in effect without the law’s public safety employee carve-out, and that either the courts or the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission could resolve a constitutionally acceptable definition in the future.

“The Legislature cites no precedent for this bold argument that I should simply strike the unlawful definition but leave it to an agency and the courts to later define as they see fit,” Frost wrote. “Interpreting ‘public safety employee’ after striking the legislated definition would be an exercise in the absurd.”

See Erik Gunn, Judge strikes down core parts of Act 10 that stripped most public workers’ union rights, Wisconsin Examiner, December 2, 2024.

Video captures cliffside rescue in San Francisco:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 49. Sunrise is 6:43, and sunset is 4:34, for 9 hours, 50 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous, with 85.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5 PM, and the Public Art Committee meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1938, Nazi Germany issues the Decree on the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life prohibiting Jews from selling goods and services or working in a trade, totally segregating Jews from the German economy.

Todd Richmond reports Wisconsin Supreme Court grapples with whether state’s 175-year-old abortion ban is valid:

A conservative prosecutor’s attorney struggled Monday to persuade the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reactivate the state’s 175-year-old abortion ban, drawing a tongue-lashing from two of the court’s liberal justices during oral arguments.

Sheboygan County’s Republican district attorney, Joel Urmanski, has asked the high court to overturn a Dane County judge’s ruling last year that invalidated the ban. A ruling isn’t expected for weeks but abortion advocates almost certainly will win the case given that liberal justices control the court. One of them, Janet Protasiewicz, remarked on the campaign trail that she supports abortion rights.

….

The ban stood until 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide nullified it. Legislators never repealed the ban, however, and conservatives have argued the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe two years ago reactivated it. 

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit challenging the law in 2022. He argued that a 1985 Wisconsin law that prohibits abortion after a fetus reaches the point where it can survive outside the womb supersedes the ban. Some babies can survive with medical help after 21 weeks of gestation.

Urmanski contends that the ban was never repealed and that it can co-exist with the 1985 law because that law didn’t legalize abortion at any point. Other modern-day abortion restrictions also don’t legalize the practice, he argues.

Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled last year that the ban outlaws feticide — which she defined as the killing of a fetus without the mother’s consent — but not consensual abortions. The ruling emboldened Planned Parenthood to resume offering abortions in Wisconsin after halting procedures after Roe was overturned.

Urmanski asked the state Supreme Court in February to overturn Schlipper’s ruling without waiting for a lower appellate decision.

See Oral Argument in Josh Kaul v. Joel Urmanski, as DA for Sheboygan County, WI 2023AP002362 at Wiseye (free subscription req’d):

As noted in yesterday’s post there is, however, a constitutional Supremacy Clause that, if relied upon following federal restrictions, would make state action moot.

Why methane emissions matter in the fight against climate change: