The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit liberals filed earlier this month seeking to prohibit the Legislature from impeaching liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz.
The high court’s decision not to hear the case follows Republican legislators’ threats to impeach Protasiewicz if she presides over two redistricting lawsuits after calling the current legislative maps “rigged” during her election campaign. The Supreme Court hasn’t accepted the two redistricting cases yet, nor has Protasiewicz said whether she’ll recuse herself from those cases.
In a brief order Tuesday, justices rejected a petition by two Protasiewicz voters, Elaine Hanson-Hysell and Deborah Anderson, for the high court to take the case even before it’s been heard in circuit court. The plaintiffs argued that impeaching Protasiewicz would violate the constitutional rights of the Wisconsinites who voted for her.
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The justices gave no explanation for rejecting the lawsuit, from which Protasiewicz recused herself soon after the case was filed.
Republicans say Protasiewicz must recuse herself from the redistricting cases challenging the current maps because she prejudged them. Democrats say her comments weren’t illegal and that impeaching her would nullify an election.
Republicans haven’t formally started impeachment proceedings against Protasiewicz. But Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has convened a secret panel of past Wisconsin Supreme Court justices to advise him on whether the newly minted liberal justice’s past actions are impeachable.
The lawsuit sought an emergency order to prevent any impeachment proceedings against Protasiewicz. It argues “the public will be irreparably harmed” unless the court acted.
The Assembly can impeach an official with a majority vote “based on specific reasons: corrupt conduct in office or for the commission of a crime or misdemeanor,” according to a Wisconsin Legislative Council memo.
But Protasiewicz’s statements don’t fall into those categories, the lawsuit stated.
“The conduct of Justice Protasiewicz cannot be in any sense historically deemed as ‘corrupt,’” the lawsuit states. “Justices routinely do not recuse themselves from issues upon which they have expressed clear points of view or in the context of previous donors to their campaigns appearing before them as litigants.”
Separately, former Wisconsin Supreme Court justices Janine Geske and Louis Butler penned a column last week arguing that Protasiewicz’s opinions aren’t impeachable.
UW-Madison law professor Rob Yablon and Derek Clinger, an attorney at UW-Madison’s State Democracy Research Initiative, have also said Protasiewicz doesn’t have to recuse herself and that impeaching her would be a “blow to the principle of judicial independence.”