It didn’t take Democrats long to come calling at the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s door and collect on last month’s big victory.
The leftist lawfare firm led by Democratic Party “fixer” and phony Russian dossier peddler Marc Elias is representing leftist voters asking the leftist-led court to toss out Wisconsin’s congressional maps and put in more Democrat-friendly boundaries in time for next year’s midterm elections. Interestingly, Democrats want to do away with the maps that far-left Gov. Tony Evers proposed. More interesting is the fact that the left’s newly elected Supreme Court justice was the guest of honor at a donor advisory meet-and-greet in January promoting the judge’s election success as critical to helping Democrats take back the House.
‘Prospect of Permanent Political Power’
The lawsuit, filed by attorneys from Elias Law Group, the D.C. firm chaired by Russian collusion hoax mule Marc Elias, makes the tired, old claim of “partisan gerrymandering” despite the fact that the Democrat governor’s redistricting plan won the day. They argue that Republicans, who controlled the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in 2011, “were enchanted by the prospect of permanent political power” and “drew congressional boundaries that assigned Wisconsinites to districts in a manner that systematically favored their own candidates, while systematically disadvantaging their opponents.”
Evers, also enchanted by the prospect of permanent political power, did as much as he could to give Democrats the edge in Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts. They still lost. In November, the Badger State’s five Republican incumbents and a political newcomer backed by President Trump won — some by substantial margins — while the two long-serving Democrat representatives racked up huge margins again in their deep blue congressional districts.
Multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, upheld the 2011 maps. In 2022, the high court rejected a drive to overturn the state’s “least change” congressional maps, authored by Evers and approved by Wisconsin’s then-conservative majority Supreme Court, even as the federal court ordered Evers’ state legislature maps to be redrawn because they contained a “racial gerrymander.” The lawsuit, in its bid to characterize the maps as “the quintessential partisan gerrymander,” also fails to mention just how bipartisan the 2011 redistricting process was. Then- U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, a neocon who would become Speaker of the House and RINO Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential running mate, worked across party lines in the map-making effort.
Another lawsuit, filed by the left-leaning Campaign Legal Center, argues the congressional maps fail to follow identical population standards because some of Wisconsin’s congressional districts include 736,715 people while others are populated by 736,716 people. The Campaign Legal Center has received significant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul and Democrat Party sugar daddy now serving a hefty federal sentence on fraud, conspiracy and money laundering convictions, according to InfluenceWatch.
‘What We Expected’
The lawsuits arrive a little more than a month after leftist Dane County Judge Susan Crawford won a pivotal election. Her high-priced victory in the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history gives liberals control of Wisconsin’s court of last resort for at least another three years. Crawford is set to join the court this summer, filling the seat of retiring liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.
Well-heeled leftists are expecting big things from Crawford and her fellow liberals ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“Crawford’s backers, including Democratic U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, said electing Crawford was important so she and other liberal justices can order Wisconsin’s congressional boundary lines to be redrawn,” the Associated Press reported following the April 1 Supreme Court election.
Organizers of January’s donor-advisory soiree pitched the importance of the Supreme Court election, selling national investors on the idea that electing Crawford could open the door for a favorable ruling on redrawn Wisconsin congressional maps. Right on cue, national leftist lawfare organizations are asking the court to do just that.
“This is exactly what we expected to happen because this is exactly what they said they would do,” Lucas Vebber, deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, told me in an interview on the Vicki McKenna Show.
‘Usurp the Legislature’s Role’
Vebber said the lawsuits are far from a “slam dunk,” however. As he recently explained in an analysis, even if the state Supreme Court accepts the original action, it “is not likely to be the final arbiter.”
Last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, with liberals holding a 4-3 majority, rejected on a 6-0 vote a request by Elias’ firm to take up their maps lawsuit. As Vebber points out in the analysis, all six members who declined to reopen the case last year remain on the court. At least three justices who adopted the governor’s congressional maps plan “would need to not only reverse their initial decision from 2022, but also to reverse their decision to decline to reopen the case just last year,” Vebber wrote.
Should the liberal majority decide to take up the congressional maps lawsuits and side with the Democrats, Vebber believes the U.S. Supreme Court would have something to say. The U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause vests the power to draw congressional maps in state legislatures. While the court has recognized over the years that courts have a role to play in redistricting disputes like the legal battles between Evers and the Republican-controlled legislature, getting involved mid-decade to redraw established maps would likely not sit well with the U.S. Supreme Court, Vebber said.
“When you actually try to usurp the legislature’s role, this kind of mid-decade redraw of state maps for congressional districts is exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court has warned state courts against doing,” the attorney said.
But we have witnessed courts at the state and federal levels in the opening months of Trump 2.0 routinely overstep their authority and step all over the other two co-equal branches of government. The Democrat Party and their big-money donors invested a lot of money in Crawford’s win, and they expect much in return. A ruling helping Democrats take back the House via more favorable maps is just the kind of return on investment the donor-advisory meeting anticipated.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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