Diane Schlipper
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Certainly Dane County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schlipper can read. And yet in her ruling last Friday, the plain language of the state’s 1849 law banning abortion escapes her.
It’s an embarrassingly wrong ruling for anyone who believes it is a judge’s job to apply the law, as written, not change the law as they wish it was. Judge Schlipper strays from her assigned duties because she knows her ruling isn’t the final word on this case. That belongs to the state’s new 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They will drive the stake through a duly passed and completely legal law that they will deem is unfashionable to today’s sensitivities because of how old it is. Friends, oldness does not make a law invalid.
Judge Schlipper says that medical abortions – where a pregnancy is terminated by taking a pill – is legal in Wisconsin because the 1849 law makes no mention of banning a pharmaceutical abortion. Hogwash. The law also doesn’t mention which medical procedures are and aren’t allowed. It doesn’t have to. The language is plain: terminating a pregnancy is illegal in Wisconsin. But not to Judge Schlipper, who says the law actually bans feticide, not abortion.
Expect more of this as liberals take control of the state’s court system. Wisconsin’s highest bench will now become a 7-member super-legislature, ready to give its final okay to already settled law. Don’t like Act 10? We’ll strike it down. Re-work the voting maps? No problem, even though the state’s Constitution says the legislature draws the voting lines. School choice? Go ahead, Governor Tony, give more funding to the program… because it may not survive our review.
Abortion is illegal in Wisconsin, as decided 175 years ago by our elected officials. The legislature may choose to repeal that, or any law, at some point in the future. That’s how laws come off the books – not at the whim of four liberal justices who currently sit on the state Supreme Court.
Chris Conley
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