By Tossing Wisconsin’s Maps, Partisan Protasiewicz Does Activists’ Bidding
Wisconsin’s left-wing supreme court gives Democrats a 2024 edge
Left-wing activists have a new best friend on the Wisconsin Supreme Court—and it’s paying dividends for Democrats.
On Jan. 2, the high court tossed Wisconsin’s legislative maps—the result of a years-long compromise between the Republican legislature and Democrat Gov. Tony Evers—in favor of a new set of maps that favor Democrats ahead of the 2024 election.
If you think that’s blind justice in action, guess again.
Far-left activists have planned this scheme for over a year, starting with their takeover of the supreme court in April 2023. That’s when Janet Protasiewicz, an ally of radical activist groups like Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, gave “progressives” their first majority on the court in 15 years.
Now those same activists are busy pushing an extreme agenda through the court, starting with Wisconsin’s legislative maps. No wonder the left-wing Brennan Center said after Protasiewicz’s election that Republican “gerrymandering [lost] big.”
Gerrymandering for Democrats
Just one day after Protasiewicz’s takeover, the partisan group Law Forward filed a lawsuit attempting to replace the maps with a new set that favors Democrats.
Recall that Protasiewicz should have recused herself from the case owing to her comments on the campaign trail, when she called the maps “rigged” and “unfair.” Unfair to whom, exactly?
Yet for leftists, whether Wisconsiners can trust the opinion of a biased judge is beside the point.
Nor does it matter to the Left that Protasiewicz just nullified the votes of 868,110 Wisconsiners who voted in the 17 senate races affected by the decision, all of which will now be redone at the taxpayers’ expense (12 of whom are Republicans, by the way).
To activists, this is a chance to gain an unfair political advantage without consulting the public. Democracy! Right?
Law Forward itself was created in October 2020 to boost Democrats “on redistricting and election litigation” by a pair of Democratic lawyers, Doug Poland and Jeff Mandell, with legal advice from former Sen. Russ Feingold (D), ex-Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton (D), and Ian Bassin, who heads the anti-Trump litigation group Protect Democracy. Both Poland and Mandell are well-known political operatives trying to give Democrats a leg up in elections.
(READ MORE: Activists Want to Gerrymander Wisconsin’s Maps. Will Janet Protasiewicz Let Them?)
Law Forward is heavily funded by out-of-state “dark money” groups, including the multi-billion-dollar Arabella Advisors network. In 2021, Law Forward received another $250,000 from America Votes, one of the Left’s top get-out-the-vote groups for juicing Democratic turnout.
We’ve also traced huge grants from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, whose board once included Barack Obama and key advisor Valerie Jarrett, and the New York-based Threshold Foundation.
Most Wisconsiners reject the extreme positions held by these groups, which is why they operate in the shadows. That’s the activist Left’s great strength: Using shadowy funding to manipulate political outcomes while pretending to respect democracy.
Until enough voters realize this, the scheme will keep working.
