Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:04 and sunset is 7:51, for 13 hours, 47 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.
Justice Rebecca Bradley didn’t attend the investiture ceremony for Susan Crawford this August1, but she has been visiting locales farther afield:
Since being appointed to the court by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Bradley has reported that several conservative groups or legal centers have picked up nearly $52,000 in lodging, meals, airfare and other expenses so she could attend 20 out-of-state conferences and seminars since 2015.
No other sitting justice reported receiving even a third of Bradley’s travel expenses covered by outside groups.
In 2023 alone, Bradley’s excursions took her to conferences at The Royal Hawaiian resort in Honolulu, the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska, and the Henderson Beach Resort in Destin, Florida. A Virginia-based legal center footed the $12,000 cost for Bradley to attend those three events.Bradley, an outspoken conservative, has also had her expenses covered to go to seminars in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Park City, Utah; and Laguna Beach, California, records show. In 2019, she even attended a three-day “Symposium on the Law and Economics of Marijuana Legalization” in Denver. Marijuana is not legal in Wisconsin.
See Daniel Bice, Justice Bradley has taken $52K in judicial junkets to resorts in Hawaii, Alaska and Florida, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 18, 2025
Justice Bradley hasn’t formally announced a campaign for re-election, but if she chooses to run, will her wanderlust be a campaign liability?
Yes, it will. While widespread self-indulgence has not been a polling liability at the federal level, Wisconsin is a small state whose electorate will not relate well to big travel.
A race between Justice Bradley and Wisconsin District IV Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, if there is one, will center on issues beyond travel. As in so many races across America, the Wisconsin contest will serve as a referendum on federal policies. Trump will, in effect, be on the ballot in races big and small across America.
And yet, and yet, opposition video after opposition video of the exotic travel locales she’s visited would only diminish Justice Bradley’s image as a tireless warrior for conservative populism.
The self-indulgence that works in the White House or Mar-a-Lago won’t work for a Wisconsin candidate.
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- Conservative Justices Ziegler and Hagedorn did attend. ↩︎
Drone footage shows Spanish village destroyed by wildfires: