Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 67. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset is 8:34 for 15 hours 19 minutes of daylight. The moon is new this evening with none of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1777, the Second Continental Congress passes the Flag Act of 1777 adopting the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States:
Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.
On Thursday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to take an appeal from a second set of appellants challenging Wisconsin’s congressional maps. (For the first set of appellants, see Wisconsin Supreme Court Accepts Challenge to Gerrymandered Congressional Maps concerning Wis. Bus. Leaders for Democracy v. Wis. Elections Comm’n, No. 2026AP1008 (Wis. May 29, 2026)). Rich Kremer reports on the second appeal by noting that this state’s high court has a few options that it may consider:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case comes nearly a year after it denied Elias’ petition asking justices to take the case up directly. In November, the majority appointed a panel of three county judges to hear the Elias suit and another to hear a different map challenge brought by liberal Wisconsin firm Law Forward.
It was an untested path to get a redistricting case before the Supreme Court, which relied on a 2011 law passed when Republicans controlled the Legislature and governorship. The panels dismissed both cases, citing the inability of lower-court judges to overrule the Supreme Court, which enacted the congressional map in 2022 during another redistricting legal battle.
While Elias filed a notice that it will appeal the panel’s ruling, no briefs had been filed as of Thursday evening explaining what parts of the panel’s decision it disagrees with.
Attorney Bryna Godar with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told WPR the Supreme Court will have to decide if Elias’ partisan gerrymandering claims can proceed.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that the court will resolve all of the issues in these cases right away,” said Godar. “If the court concludes that these claims are available under the Wisconsin Constitution, then it’s possible that they would send the case back to the three judge panels for further fact finding and a specific ruling on whether these maps violate the state constitution.”
See Rich Kremer, Wisconsin Supreme Court accepts another appeal aimed at redrawing congressional map, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 12, 2026.
Two points come to the fore. First, the disposition of these cases will not affect the 2026 congressional district maps. Any decision here would apply to the maps for our 2028 congressional election.
Second, when conservative justices on the court call these appeals ‘political,’ and thus illegitimate, they should recall that the least-change doctrine they created and imposed on Wisconsin’s prior maps was an unprecedented alteration of our elections law perpetuating political decisions from a decade earlier. For a critique of that former conservative majority’s approach, see Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, 136 Harv. L. Rev. 998 (2023) (‘Wisconsin Supreme Court Adopts New Election Maps that Change Existing Districts Least, Regardless of Partisan Bias’):
In Johnson I, the Wisconsin Supreme Court carved out a new form of entrenchment protecting the state’s biased maps. Scholars have called entrenchment “the fundamental problem . . . that defines . . . election law.”97 Partisan gerrymanders, for instance, are insidious in part because they entrench themselves politically. Voters who want to get rid of the gerrymander often must vote out a party that has stacked elections in its favor. Just as partisan gerrymanders advantage gerrymanderers politically, Johnson I’s doctrinal gerrymander — selectively moving a disfavored remedy into a more demanding rights test — advantaged gerrymanderers in court. The justices thereby created a new form of entrenchment: a doctrinal skew that tilts the legal playing field against arguments for unwinding a gerrymander and toward arguments for perpetuating it. That choice, in turn, entrenches Wisconsin’s biased maps more deeply than ever.
Consideration of an appeal against our current congressional maps is, at bottom, to redress a lingering unfairness in those maps.
A copy of the June 11 order, Bothfeld v. Wis. Elections Comm’n, No. 2026AP1168 (Wis. June 11, 2026) appears below:
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
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