Time to revisit "Alice in Wonderland," Wisconsin Edition. Here's the latest act of twisted judicial logic from a real piece of work. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser just issued a written opinion affirming that he, David Prosser, is a man above reproach.
You see, Prosser, according to Prosser, followed the rules. That would be the rigged, self-serving rules he and other conservative justices on the court devised to exclude themselves from the necessity of having to avoid conflicts of interest. It's a self-awarded privilege that the self-serving Prosser now helpfully explains to perplexed citizens: You see, nothing to see here. All is tidy. Justice has been done. Or, more precisely, done in.
The former conservative Wisconsin Republican legislator last made headlines four years ago when, according to witnesses, he choked fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in her chambers, an incident never reviewed because the full court couldn't gain a quorum from its conservative wing.
This time Prosser produced 15 pages of text to explain to the public why he didn't have to recuse himself from voting to quash the John Doe investigation. That's the inquiry involving Gov. Scott Walker and two conservative issue groups. The groups supported the Walker and Prosser elections, along with those of Michael Gableman, another justice on the court, with millions of dollars in supposedly independent campaign expenditures. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Prosser -- whose campaign treasurer is also the treasurer for Walker -- basically argued that the public chose him at the ballot box, so there. He'll serve out his ten-year term -- not in jail for his transgressions, but on the court making more questionable rulings. And then, he helpfully points out, upset voters can decide to throw him out, if of course years hence they still remember this and his other missteps.
The voters also might by the end of his term forget -- if they ever knew -- that it was Prosser and the other conservatives on the court who decreed they alone could decide whether to recuse themselves in cases of apparent interest conflicts, a contrary US Supreme Court prescription notwithstanding. Not unusual for this unusual group of conservative justices, who also ignored US Supreme Court precedent in throwing out the Doe probe that threatened their pals. The Journal Sentinel:
Prosser's decision revealed one of the people caught up in the investigation had been involved in Prosser's 2011 re-election bid and had stressed the importance of finding donors for him. He did not name the person but downplayed the person's role and said many were involved in helping him. The underlying irony here is that unlike Prosser and the other conservative justice who declined to recuse from the Doe case, the liberal Justice Bradley did. Unlike the conservatives, she didn't have financial campaign assistance from parties to the Doe case. Rather, her adult son is a lawyer who happened to work for a large law firm where another lawyer was representing someone in the case. An abundance of caution, in other words. No such caution from Prosser et. al., however -- only abundant recklessness. More irony: When it came time for the justices to consider officially reviewing the facts in the 2011 choking case they'd witnessed, this, according again to the Capital Times, is why nothing happened: All but one of the justices, Patrick Crooks, witnessed the incident. Justices Annette Ziegler, Michael Gableman and Roggensack have recused themselves from the case, so there's no quorum to move the case to a three-judge panel, which would make disciplinary recommendations to the Supreme Court. That's right: Conservative Justice Gabelman, who refused to recuse himself in one of the biggest and most politically tinged cases ever brought before the court DID recuse himself when not doing so might have endangered his wingman, Prosser. It was one, big, wet kiss.To recuse or not recuse? That is the question. And the apparent answer, for the conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is: We recuse ourselves when it helps our side, and we don't recuse ourselves when it would hurt our side.
It's not judicial, it's just situational. Now that's some kind of justice -- Queen of Hearts justice, in fact, heavily laced with self-serving illogic and arrogant authoritarianism.
Weep for Wisconsin. The politicization of its highest court is now complete, engineered by shadowy conservative groups that patronized the justices who just absolved them. And now, Prosser openly absolves himself, too, thanks to his own rules, written and interpreted only by himself and his judicial consorts.
It's a Wonderland kind of democracy, all right. Unless more citizens start yelling, "Off with their heads!"