Janet Protasiewicz, left, was sworn in Tuesday as a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. Morry Gash/AP
On Tuesday, at roughly the same time that Donald Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as a new member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving progressives their first majority on the court since 2008. The new composition of the court has major ramifications for American democracy—the previous conservative majority came one vote shy of ruling in favor of Trump’s effort to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin and upheld the gerrymandered maps that locked in huge GOP legislative majorities and a series of laws that made it harder to vote. The new liberal majority could now unwind that, restoring democracy and majority rule in the state.
On Wednesday, voting rights groups filed a new lawsuit challenging the GOP’s gerrymandered maps. The suit claims that the state legislative maps violate the Wisconsin constitution by retaliating against some voters based on their viewpoints and free speech; treating some voters worse than others because of their political views and where they live; and defying the promise of a free government enshrined in the state constitution. (Separate litigation could also be filed challenging the state’s congressional maps, where Republicans hold six of eight US House seats despite the evenly divided political makeup of the state.) By taking their challenge directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, state and national voting rights groups hope that new maps will be put in place before the 2024 election. Law Forward, a progressive legal group based in Madison, filed the lawsuit alongside organizations that included the Campaign Legal Center and the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Since 2011, when GOP operatives drew new redistricting maps in secret, Wisconsin has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. The lines adopted by Republicans in 2021 preserved and expanded the GOP’s advantage, largely because the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that it would choose state legislative and congressional maps that made the “least changes” from the 2011 maps, which virtually ensured that the new lines would be heavily stacked in the GOP’s favor. GOP assembly leader Robin Vos admitted that the “least changes” requirement was “not in the [Wisconsin] Constitution” and that the new lines were passed for partisan purposes.
In 2022, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was reelected with 51 percent of the vote and Democrats won 4 of 6 statewide elections, but Republicans retained 67 percent of state Senate seats and 65 percent of Assembly seats. They attained a supermajority in the senate and came just two seats short of gaining a supermajority in the assembly, which would have allowed Republicans to overrule the governor’s vetoes and make him functionally irrelevant.
While campaigning for a seat on the court, Protasiewicz said that the GOP’s maps were “absolutely, positively rigged,” and “do not reflect the people in the state.” Republicans will try to force Protasiewicz to recuse herself from the redistricting case and even floated the idea of impeaching her during the campaign in April, although Evers would simply choose her replacement under that scenario.
Extreme gerrymandering has given Republicans in the legislature a green light to entrench their own power— such as when they passed a series of lame-duck laws stripping power from Evers after he won election in 2018 —while allowing them to block popular policies on issues like abortion, guns, and education with little accountability.
Voting rights activists believe that striking down the gerrymandered maps is the first and most important step toward making Wisconsin a truly representative democracy again. As Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me after the 2022 election, “the state is not a democracy as long as these maps are in place.”
