Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 42. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:38 PM for 13h 29m 05s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2018, The New York Times and the New Yorker win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for breaking news of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal.
Following a decision of the United States Supreme Court in March, on Friday the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of Republican-proposed state legislative maps. (The Friday decision does not affect Congressional districts, as those district boundaries had already been approved in state and federal rulings.)
The WISGOP least-change maps that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has adopted cement for another decade a gerrymandered Republican advantage:
Robert Yablon, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and redistricting expert, said the court’s decision had reinforced a map that was “strikingly” gerrymandered.
“And it means that although this state is often a 50-50 state one where Democrats have frequently managed to win statewide races, they are going to have virtually no chance of taking control of the Legislature,” Yablon said in an interview with PBS Wisconsin.
An analysis of the competing redistricting plans by Marquette University’s John Johnson found that in a statewide tie, Republicans would be expected to win 63 out of 99 Assembly seats and 23 out of 33 Senate seats under the new GOP map.
(Any least-change approach this decade was assured of preserving last decade’s maximum-change gerrymandering.)
It’s likely that there will be additional challenges to these state districts, but if so those challenges (of dubious prospects based on the latest relevant U.S. and Wisconsin high court decisions) would come too late to change 2022 legislative boundaries.
Candidates for state legislative offices, who under Wisconsin law can circulate petitions beginning April 15th, will now know the boundaries of their districts.
Immediately below, the decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.