Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Thursday that impeaching Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz was not off the table but indicated he would wait to see how she rules on a case challenging the state’s legislative maps before deciding how to proceed.
The comments come two days after a conservative former Supreme Court justice advised Vos, a Rochester Republican, against moving forward with impeachment over Protasiewicz’s decision not to recuse herself from the redistricting challenge.
During her victorious campaign for the state Supreme Court, which gave left-leaning justices a 4-3 majority on the bench, Protasiewicz drew criticism from conservatives for calling the current legislative districts “rigged” and for taking campaign contributions from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, though they are not involved in the redistricting case.
If she did not step aside from the cases, filed shortly after she was sworn-in in August, Vos initially said he would consider impeachment.
But Protasiewicz brushed aside calls for recusal in a ruling Friday, which came as the state's high court decided to take up the redistricting case. Vos’ statement in response to the move made no mention of impeachment.
Speaking at a press conference prior to the Assembly’s floor session Thursday, Vos said lawmakers would be focused on Protasiewicz’s conduct while in office and would be watching how she rules on the map issue.
“She has said she can be an independent jurist,” Vos said. “If we see that the contributions that the Democratic Party made to her expecting a result result in (a ruling in their favor), that will certainly be something that we have to keep on the table because she will not live up to her oath.”
Vos previously announced he was enlisting the help of three former state Supreme Court justices — since revealed to be David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Jon Wilcox — to study whether impeachment was warranted.
In an email to Vos on Friday, Prosser said the idea “will be viewed as unreasonable partisan politics” and that there were no grounds for impeaching Protasiewicz.
Under the state Constitution, an official can be impeached only for “corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors.”
“To sum up my views, there should be no effort to impeach Justice Protasiewicz on anything we know now,” Prosser told Vos. “Impeachment is so serious, severe, and rare that it should not be considered unless the subject has committed a crime, or the subject has committed indisputable ‘corrupt conduct’ while ‘in office.’”
Wilcox told the Associated Press he also did not favor impeachment. Vos declined to say what Roggensack’s advice was.
The Legislature's path to impeachment has appeared to grow more challenging in recent weeks, with lawmakers questioning whether the move is worth it. A simple majority in the Assembly is all that is required to impeach an official, though some GOP lawmakers in that chamber have already opposed the idea.
A two-thirds vote, meanwhile, is needed to convict in the state Senate. One Republican lawmaker, Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, told a Milwaukee TV station he does not support impeachment, which would leave GOP leaders short of the required supermajority in the upper chamber.
Vos has said lawmakers would not hesitate to take the redistricting case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court tossed out the state Supreme Court's decision in 2021 to adopt a redistricting plan authored by Gov. Tony Evers.
“If they decide to inject their own political bias inside the process … we have the ability to go to the U.S. Supreme Court and we also have the ability to hold her accountable to the voters of Wisconsin,” Vos said.
