Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:14 AM and sunset 7:37 PM for 13h 22m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1832, Black Hawk, leader of the Sauk tribe of Native Americans, surrenders to U.S. authorities, ending the Black Hawk War:
The Black Hawk War resulted in the deaths of 77 settlers, militiamen, and regular soldiers. This figure does not include the deaths from cholera suffered by the relief force under General Winfield Scott. Estimates of how many members of the British Band [Sauks, Meskwakis (Fox), and Kickapoos] died during the conflict range from about 450 to 600, or about half of the 1,100 people who entered Illinois with Black Hawk in 1832.
A number of American men with political ambitions fought in the Black Hawk War. At least seven future U.S. Senators took part, as did four future Illinois governors; future governors of Michigan, Nebraska, and the Wisconsin Territory; and two future U.S. presidents, Taylor and Lincoln. The Black Hawk War demonstrated to American officials the need for mounted troops to fight a mounted foe. During the war, the U.S. Army did not have cavalry; the only mounted soldiers were part-time volunteers. After the war, Congress created the Mounted Ranger Battalion under the command of Henry Dodge, which was expanded to the 1st Cavalry Regiment in 1833.
(Citations omitted.)
Patrick Marley, formerly of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and now at the Washington Post, writes about the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Wisconsin Supreme Court flips liberal, creating a ‘seismic shift.’ (Open link.) His reporting covers the recent history of the court and likely upcoming cases and disputes. Marley begins:
MADISON, Wis. — Standing in the marble-lined rotunda of the state capitol this month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s incoming justice raised her right hand, swore to carry out her job “faithfully and impartially” and launched a new, liberal era on a powerful court long dominated by conservatives.
The fallout was immediate.
Within days, the new majority stripped duties from the court’s conservative chief justice and fired itsadministrative director, a conservative former judge who once ran for the court. The abrupt changes prompted the chief justice to accuse her liberal colleagues of engaging in “nothing short of a coup.” Before long, Republican lawmakers threatened to impeach the court’s newest member.
Liberal groups, long accustomed to seeing the court as hostile terrain, quickly maneuvered for potential victories on a string of major issues. They filed lawsuits to try to redraw the state’s legislative districts, which heavily favor Republicans. And the Democratic attorney general sought to speed up a case challenging a 19th-century law that has kept doctors from providing abortions in Wisconsin.
“It’s an absolute seismic shift in Wisconsin policy and politics,” said C.J. Szafir, the chief executive of the conservative, Wisconsin-based Institute for Reforming Government. “We’re about to usher in a very progressive state Supreme Court, the likes that we have not seen in quite some time. And it’s really going to change how everything operates.”
The turnaround on the Wisconsin court is the result of an April election that became the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with campaigns and interest groups spending more than $50 million.
At stake in that race, with the retirement of a conservative justice who held a decisive vote on a 4-3 court, was the question of who would make crucial rulings in a swing state that could decide the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Conservatives had controlled the court for 15 years, during which they upheld a voter ID law, approved limits on collective bargaining for public workers, banned absentee ballot drop boxes and shut down a wide-ranging campaign finance investigation into Republicans.
Excellent all the way through.
Thailand’s Homemade Rocket Festival:
I think that the WISC/WIGOP brawl has just started to get ugly. I fully expect Vos to follow thru on his impeachment threat. It is his most direct tool, and he won’t hesitate to employ it.
Expect the state assembly to vote to impeach Janet on some made-up charge very soon. If not her, then one of the other libs on the court. Vos easily has the votes to do that. The state senate will then delay voting to convict her until after the deadline for fixing Gerrymandering before the 2024 election. She can’t vote on anything, being essentially “suspended with pay” until the senate votes on her conviction. She is essentially neutered, as it Evers, as he can’t replace her if she is still in purgatory.
I suppose that Janet could quit, and Evers could immediately replace her, either with another lib, or even Janet, herself. Vos would then just immediately move to impeach the next lib. There is no doubt about that. Vos is ruthless, and won’t hesitate to play hardball. This is an existential threat to him, and he won’t play by any rules except his own.
Expect lots of ugliness to ensue. Lawsuits will fly! There will be a major effort to elect Democratic State Senators in 2024, even if the Gerrymandering is still in place.
The question I keep asking myself is “Where is Hagedorn in all of this?”. He has shown flashes of judicial character on occasion. Will he now on the gerrymandering issue?
Agreed about Vos, and about your highlighting of gerrymandering as the true motivation for Vos’s concern. (If elected WISGOP politicians cared about the deepest issues, they’d be more upset over the return of abortion rights than gerrymandering, by their own repeated claims. They’re not truly more upset over abortion; if anything, they’d happily raise funds while decrying a return of abortion rights. I don’t share their views on reproductive rights, but then deep down, it’s clear that even they don’t share their own stated views over abortion policy.)
Gerrymandering, however, benefits WISGOP incumbents directly, and as you say, existentially. That’s their issue to fight over, and fight over it they will, to the last wheezing dog. Freezing the court in place, with one fewer voting justice, will keep Wisconsin deservedly in the national focus as a failed polity, a state government corrupted from its proper form.
Our bad times are far from over.