Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM for 12h 04m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1889, Nintendo Koppai (Later Nintendo Company, Limited) is founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce and market the playing card game Hanafuda.
Yesterday’s Daily Bread at FREE WHITEWATER (‘New Political Maps for Wisconsin by March?‘) highlighted Riley Vetterkind’s reporting that a Federal court indicates it wants Wisconsin’s new political maps in place by March (‘A federal judicial panel on Tuesday indicated it wants Wisconsin’s new political maps in place by March 1, calling for the completion of a potential redistricting trial by the end of January as lawmakers work to draw the new decennial legislative and congressional district boundaries’).
A day after that federal court timetable, the Wisconsin Supreme Court sprang into action, as Patrick Marley reports in Wisconsin Supreme Court agrees to hear redistricting case, setting up a second court battle over Legislative maps:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to take a case over the state’s redistricting practices on Wednesday, a day after a federal court scheduled a January trial on the same issue.
The state’s high court agreed to take the case on a 4-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent. Conservatives asked the justices to take the case last month as Democrats and voting rights groups filed their own lawsuits in federal court.
….
The majority’s order accepting the case was brief. In a concurring opinion, Rebecca Bradley argued state courts are the ones that should hear redistricting challenges, even though federal courts have taken them up in recent decades.
“It is primarily the duty of this court, not any federal court, to resolve such redistricting disputes,” Bradley wrote.
States are required to draw new maps every 10 years to make sure districts are of equal population based on data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. How the lines are drawn can give one political party an advantage over the other.
….
In the redistricting lawsuit, [Eric] O’Keefe [a board member of Empower Wisconsin, a conservative group that has been running ads against Evers] and the others contend any maps the court approves should have as few changes as possible. That would likely keep in place many of the advantages Republicans have under the maps that were drawn in 2011.
Yesterday’s commentary at FREE WHITEWATER: “The WISGOP will do all it can to get this case dismissed from federal court, thereafter to seek recourse in state court.”
The WISGOP (and it’s the WISGOP that matters in a redistricting battle, not O’Keefe) is halfway to what it wants: the case now is in state court, and the conservatives need only see the dismissal of the federal consolidated actions to have the forum of their choice.
Wednesday was a good day for Wisconsin’s conservatives, if for no one else.
Spinning seeds inspire floating electronics – and monitor the atmosphere:
This is going to be a bloody battle. This is existential for Vos/Republicans. They will not prevail in fair elections, so they will do whatever necessary to maintain power. Vos is not going to to back to selling popcorn and student slum-lording in WW voluntarily.
O’Keefe is a long-time Republican dark-art player. Bruce Murphy profiled him in 2014: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2014/02/13/murphys-law-the-wrath-of-eric-okeefe/
This odyssey is far from over. It’s going to get depressingly ugly.
Agreed all around — depressingly ugly in selfishness and corruption. The WISGOP cannot win a stand-up fight with fair maps. Gerrymandering brought them, keeps them, and only gerrymandering will sustain them.
They’re like guests at the Ritz Carlton who think that staying at the property means they own the hotel.
[…] See also Wisconsin Counties Backing Fair Maps and But Whose New Maps for Wisconsin? […]