Judicial Impartiality

You’ve probably heard the commercials saying that a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice needs to be impartial, to follow the law and precedents, and to not have her or his mind made up before a case is actually heard. Those are admirable principles, and in fact that’s the way the court used to operate before its current right-wing cabal engineered the ouster of Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2015. Regrettably, it’s been relentlessly partisan ever since.

The sick irony of those hypocritical commercials is that they’re on behalf of a candidate who’s the exact antithesis of those noble ideals, a situation which would be laffable if it weren’t so tragic. Daniel Kelly, a graduate of Christian Broadcasting University Law School, previously served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but not because he was elected to the position. In 2016 he was appointed by then-Governor Scott Walker to fill a vacancy, but he was rejected by the voters when he ran for his own seat in 2020. Now he’s trying for a comeback, this time with backing not from the departed Walker but from tens of millions of dollars in out-of-state dark money. But both Walker and those mystery funders want him on the court for precisely the same reason: they know, in advance, exactly how he’s going to vote.

He’s a reliable rubber stamp for voter suppression, the super-rich, gerrymandering, and anything the gerrymandered Republican legislature wants and against judicial ethics codes, state-agency expertise, open government, religious neutrality, and the rights of workers and women.

After Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, a group of Republican conspirators put together a slate of fake electors to go to Washington DC and try to claim that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won Wisconsin. This outrageous attempt to subvert the will of the people needed legal advice, and guess who they got it from. Yup, old reliably hyper-partisan Dan Kelly. His work on behalf of a slate of fake electors alone should disqualify him from ever again holding a position of public trust. Really, it would have made him the most disgraceful ex-justice in Wisconsin if his fellow election denier, also-defeated former justice Michael Gableman, hadn’t set the bar even lower by squandering millions of taxpayer dollars “investigating” non-existent electoral fraud at the behest of the gerrymandered legislature.

Come April 4, the last person any fan of judicial impartiality should be voting for is Dan Kelly.