Tea-Publican Tyranny in Wisconsin Update: Conservative activist court rules the ‘legislature is above the law’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

This is a classic example of why judges should not be elected in partisan elections. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is absolutely correct.

A partisan conservative activist Wisconsin Supreme Court in a divided 4-3 opinion said Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi "usurped the legislative power which the Wisconsin constitution grants exclusively to the Legislature" when she voided Gov. Scott Walker's measure limiting public sector collective bargaining. Divided Supreme Court clears way for collective bargaining law to take effect (Wisconsin State Journal).

Really? The Wisconsin Supreme Court is abdicating its duty of judicial review under the Constitution established by Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. The legislature makes its own rules and therefore is above the law? Somebody failed grade school civics, not to mention law school.

[I]n a stinging dissent, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson accused the authors of the court's order — Justices Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, along with concurring Justice David Prosser — of naked partisanship in rushing out a decision that contained "unsupported conclusions."

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The court… declined to step into the dispute over whether the March 9 conference committee meeting violated the state's open meetings law, leaving it to the Legislature to set its own rules.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, said the court's decision validates secrecy by the Legislature.

"The majority of the Supreme Court is essentially saying that the Legislature is above the law. It's now clear that unless the constitution is amended, the Legislature is free to ignore any laws on the books," Barca said.

Alex Hanna, co-president of the Teaching Assistants' Association, questioned the timing of the ruling as "almost too perfect" and said it's an "incredibly awful precedent."

The court's order came just as the state Assembly was preparing to reinsert the collective bargaining language into the two-year budget Tuesday night to move beyond the legal impasse. "Screw the courts, we are going to do whatever we want."

In her dissent, Abrahamson said the high court erred in taking the case up directly instead of waiting for one party or the other to appeal a lower court's ruling. She singled out [David] Prosser, whose concurrence, she wrote, "is long on rhetoric and long on story-telling that appears to have a partisan slant."

Abrahamson said she agreed with Justice Patrick Crooks' separate dissent, that the case should come to the Supreme Court as part of an "orderly appellate review of the circuit court's order with a full opinion."

"Only with a reasoned, accurate analysis can a court assure the litigants and the public that a decision is made on the basis of facts and law," Abrahamson wrote, "free from a judge's personal ideology and free from external pressure by the executive or legislative branches, by partisan political parties, by public opinion or by special interest groups."

Crooks wrote that the majority reached "a hasty decision" that doesn't address important questions about the Legislature's constitutional requirements to provide public access to its hearings and the courts' role in holding it to those requirements.

"Those who would rush to judgment on these matters are essentially taking the position that getting this opinion out is more important than doing it right and getting it right," he wrote. "It is rather astonishing that the court would choose to decide such an unusual and complex case without benefit of a complete record."

Read the decision from the Supreme Court.

Tyranny "can come silently, slowly, like fog creeping in 'on little cat feet.'" Tyranny has insinuated itself into the government of Wisconsin and many other states. Democracies fail not from violent overthrow by an external enemy but from internal despotism made possible by apathy and indifference of the citizenry.

– "But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." — Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

– "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." — Samuel Adams

– "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." — Edmund Burke