Republicans are requesting a liberal Wisconsin judge recuse herself from potentially considering reviewing the Badger State’s congressional maps.
Earlier this month, Democrats asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider the state’s congressional maps, using the high court’s opinion in a separate elections maps lawsuit as reason to consider a redo over Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
But five members of Wisconsin’s GOP congressional delegation filed a motion Tuesday asking Justice Janet Protasiewicz to recuse herself from hearing the case, pointing to comments she made when she was a candidate running for a spot on the court last year as reason to not weigh in.
Among some of the comments Republicans pointed to included her calling the state’s maps “rigged” and saying she “would certainly welcome the opportunity to have a fresh look at our maps.” However, neither she, nor her Republican opponent, detailed how they would vote on a potential case while on the campaign trail.
Counties are too big and uneven. Districts must be contiguous and follow existing civic boundaries according to the state constitution, which is already an issue because those boundaries aren’t always contiguous.* But add to that the fact most of the population lives in a handful of countries all clustered together and it becomes impossible to distribute the congressional districts evenly. Not to mention that many cities are split across county lines, creating even more complexities.
But even ignoring that, the bigger issue is actually the state legislature. There’s tons of districts to distribute there, we can’t just use counties for all of them. And that’s the real issue anyway. Wisconsin is a 50.1/49.9 purple state that has managed to go blue consistently in statewide elections in recent years, but also somehow has a supermajority Republican state legislature. I’d make a sarcastic comment about how that was a mystery, but why should I bother when the Republicans won’t even pretend they’re being fair. They’ve admitted they gerrymandered for political gain, and defended that by saying it isn’t illegal.
In short, it’s complicated and full of grey areas, contradictions and judgment calls, which means the only way we’ll get a fair map is if the people drawing the lines actually want a fair map.
* Some of those places have more of a Jackson Pollock look, and cities have been known to annex individual properties without bothering to grab the land to connect them. And with this stuff going on for the better part of two centuries, the whole map is a clusterfuck.