News Clips

He described Crow as a “personal friend,” according to the disclosure form, one of several from the 1990s that is no longer publicly available but was provided to The Washington Post by watchdog organizations Common Cause and Documented.

During an interview with the Wisconsin Law Journal last week, Executive Director Jay Heck of the non-partisan government accountability group Common Cause noted that Wisconsin ranked as the 47th worst in the nation, according to a Center for American Progress study for judicial ethics recusal rules. The study looked at the strength of recusal rules for judges in every state, ranking each state 1-50. “Even Cook County (in Chicago) has stronger recusal rules for judges, which is a pretty low bar given Chicago’s reputation,” Heck said. “Chicago has always been the thing we don’t want to be. It’s the bar you always want to surpass in terms of politics, ethics and corruption,” Heck added. Citing a Marquette University Law School poll on reduced confidence in Wisconsin’s courts, Heck said, “It’s reasonable to open to the public how a court operates, especially with the low regard noted in Marquette Law School polls. Wisconsin courts used to be highly regarded, but that has dissipated over the years, as big money has inundated elections,” Heck said.

“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.” “What’s happening now is a direct result of conservatives’ decision they’d take all this underground and not meet in public,” says Heck. Given their track record, “If conservatives were the new majority there would be no question about what they’d do,” Heck adds. “They’d name a conservative chief justice and say, ‘We have a 4-3 majority, try to stop us.’” Unlike the conservatives who pushed out Abrahamson, however, the new progressive majority has stopped short of trying to replace Ziegler. Still, Heck has heard from people who worry that the new majority is being too bold and assertive. “Progressives are not really like that. We’re always saying, ‘Let’s do the right thing and the fair thing,’” he says.

Common Cause North Carolina’s Bob Phillips called the ruling “the worst decision, perhaps, the state Supreme Court has ever made.” In her dissent, Justice Anita Earls wrote that “today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority.”

Adding partisan labels “encourages the candidates and voters to think about these justices as partisan actors,” said Common Cause Ohio’s Catherine Turcer. “And that's a real problem when it comes to wanting an independent, impartial judiciary.”

Flight attendants use euphemistic doublespeak because, understandably, they want to avoid terms like “hijacking” and "September 11th.” For similar reasons, Jones spoke in broad terms, without directly invoking Trump or January 6th. (There were also other reasons for this, such as Common Cause’s nonpartisan status.) Even so, the implications were clear. At one point, an organizer sitting in the audience stood, using a cane, and gave an impromptu speech, urging listeners to imagine a Supreme Court opinion that enabled legislatures to rig elections at will. “There was a time when I used to think things like that couldn’t happen,” he said. “But then we had January 6th, Roe—these things can happen. They’re happening.”