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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Our election for a state supreme court justice today is nothing short of a mockery. We have current justice Janice Protasiewicz to blame.
When she was elected in 2023 she openly talked about being the pro-choice candidate. The U.S. Supreme Court had just struck down Roe v Wade and Wisconsin’s 1865 ban on abortion was back on the books. Pro-abortion dollars from across the U.S. filled Justice Janice’s campaign coffers. She openly told everyone how she would vote when Wisconsin’s law was challenged, and she won by a landslide.
How interesting to know that someday you might have a case that reaches the state supreme court, and before the first legal brief is filed, before the first argument is heard, some justices are already on the record as to how they will vote. That’s what our Supreme Court elections have degenerated into.
In today’s race, appeals court judge Chris Taylor proudly campaigns as a pro-choice justice. Really? Regardless of what the law says? If Wisconsin law specifically and unequivocally were to ban abortion, Justice Taylor would stay up day and night finding a way around it? That’s her pitch to the voters.
Contrast that with Maria Lazar, who says the law says what it says. She tells voters, correctly, that her job on the state supreme court is to apply the law as written; not as she wishes it were. Judge Lazar points out that if the mood of Wisconsin residents about abortion, or any other issue changes, the legislature is free to pass new laws or revoke old ones. That, of course, is the proper role of a judge. And what’ll it get ya? Defeat on election day.
Wisconsin should be embarrassed with what our supreme court elections have devolved into. But, no matter, a strident group of pro-abortion activists don’t care that they’ve turned our highest could unto a super-legislature, free to bend the law to their liking. Justice be damned.
Chris Conley
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