MADISON, Wis. (Legal Newsline) - Liberal justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court are accused by a colleague of doing the bidding of the Democratic Party as Dems attempt to quickly stop a third-party Presidential candidate from siphoning votes from Kamala Harris.
The Green Party, which touts its advocacy for Democrat causes like environmentalism, has a candidate - Jill Stein. The Wisconsin Elections Commission has decided the party is eligible to be on the ballot in November because she received more than 31,000 votes in the 2016 election.
Donald Trump won the state's electoral votes that year with a narrow victory of about 23,000 votes. Hillary Clinton certainly could have used some of the 31,000 votes Stein received in that election.
But the Green Party didn't make the 2020 ballot, helping Joe Biden defeat Trump by about 20,000 votes that year. Democrats seemed to have learned a valuable lesson and on Monday filed a petition in the state Supreme Court to keep the Green Party off the ballot.
An order only three days after the petition was filed indicates liberals will fast-track the Democrats' cause, angering conservative justices who say this is special treatment for political purposes.
"The majority steps beyond its neutral role to lawyer the case on behalf of the DNC, seemingly facilitating an expedited review of this original action," conservative Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley dissented.
"Other parties presenting original action petitions have not received such preferential treatment by this court."
The Democrats' petition claims technical errors with the state's process. The Green Party has no state officers or senators to meet at the state capitol at 10 a.m. on the first Tuesday in October to nominate presidential electors.
So the Green Party needed to identify an affiliated person eligible to nominate an elector by placing a candidate on the ballot for a legislative district.
"Because the Wisconsin Green Party has no affiliated individuals who are eligible under Wisconsin law to nominate presidential electors for the Wisconsin Green Party, the Party cannot as a matter of law field a candidate for president 'for which electors in [each] county may vote," the petition from the Democratic National Committee says.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission meets next week to certify the ballot it has approved, which includes the Green Party. So things obviously need to move quickly through the Supreme Court's docket.
The WEC was served with the suit on Tuesday, a day after it was filed. The Green Party got it Wednesday.
By Thursday, the liberal court was ready to get things moving. It gave the DNC two hours to provide it with the contact information for WEC officials who could accept orders of the court.
"The majority issues an unprecedented order directing the petitioner - within two hours - to give the court contact information for the respondents, which is currently absent from the record because no one has entered an appearance on behalf of any parties," conservative Bradley wrote.
"To my knowledge, at no time in history has the court issued orders before parties had made their appearances."
It's the latest fight between conservatives and liberals in the wake of the 2022 election that gave liberals a 4-3 majority. That race between Janet Protasiewicz and Dan Kelly was full of out-of-state liberal money and lacked congeniality, and its aftermath has been just as nasty.
Redistricting and abortion were issues on the horizon as the sides fought for their own 4-3 majority. In the end, it was the liberal justices who outnumbered conservatives.
The contention spilled over onto the bench, with a conservative minority in one case calling the majority opinion "tyranny," while the conservative chief justice Annette Ziegler accused the liberals of a power grab.
In July, the liberal majority said the law allows absentee voters to put their votes in ballot drop boxes, rather than return them in the mail or in-person to their county clerk's office.
The overwhelmingly Republican Legislature said existing law affirmed in 2022 in a case known as Teigen forbid drop boxes, and a trial judge agreed. But Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, intervened and urged the court to overrule Teigen, which it did.
"The majority again forsakes the rule of law in an attempt to advance its political agenda," Bradley wrote.
"The majority began this term by tossing the legislative maps adopted by this court... for the sole purpose of facilitating 'the redistribution of political power in the Wisconsin legislature.'
"The majority ends the term by loosening the legislature's regulations governing the privilege of absentee voting in the hopes of tipping the scales in future elections."