Greed and the Wisconsin Supreme Court

If you’ve been in front of a television recently, you’ve probably seen those ads trying to influence the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Incumbent Louis Butler is being challenged by Butler County Circuit Judge Mike Gableman. Gableman is the bobblehead who allegedly bought his seat on the bench and Butler is the alleged criminal coddler.

For years and years candidates for state Supreme Court conducted low-key campaigns awash in decorum and highfalutin legal principles. But that was then and this is now. Over the last two contests, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group has decided to spend an inordinately large amount of money to elect candidates to the state Supreme Court who are friendlier to business interests.

Last year, the group spent big bucks to elect Annette Ziegler to the court, despite the ethical lapses that led to her being sanctioned for failing to disclose her ties to a bank that was involved in a case before her. Now it is throwing its girth into a campaign to unseat a respected incumbent on the court by attempting to portray Louis Butler as soft on crime.

The business leaders who have signed off on this transparent effort to make the court more pliant to the state’s wealthy corporate interests should be ashamed. This isn’t about crime, this is about greed.

Newsweek did a fairly comprehensive analysis of this race and cited “uncanny parallels” between the election in Wisconsin and the plot of John Grisham’s novel, “The Appeal,” where business interests fund attacks on an African-American member of the state Supreme Court in Mississippi. In both cases, the business groups falsely accuse the sitting justice of acting to release a convicted sexual predator.

The Greater Wisconsin Committee, a liberal advocacy group, has responded to these horrid attacks with ads questioning the challenger’s record on crime. To his credit, Butler has called on all third party groups on both sides to “stand down” and allow the candidates to make their own cases.

Unfortunately, challenger Gableman has engaged in his own outrageous attack campaign which is drawing fire from the state’s good government groups, including the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign , Wisconsin Judicial Integrity Campaign Committee, Common Cause and Citizen Action, for false statements and misrepresenting Butler’s record.

But those fine, upstanding folks at the WMC definitely deserve a dubious achievement award for acting so selfishly and egregiously on behalf of the state’s wealthiest interests. Former Madison mayor and liberal blogger Paul Soglin is engaged in a personal campaign to call the members of the WMC to account for this greedy behavior.

The members of the WMC board are ultimately responsible for this reprehensible slander of Justice Butler. These business executives probably support token good causes and are undoubtedly regarded as respected pillars in their communities. But they shouldn’t be able to hide behind the relative anonymity of the front group they control.

How can we expect citizens to have faith in our government when the groups with the deepest pockets try to subvert the institutions we rely on the most to serve the public interest objectively and honestly? Isn’t it time we told the WMC leadership and their ilk to focus more attention on the quality of their products and providing decent wages and benefits to their workers rather than spending gobs of money to stack the judiciary?

There goes one of the WMC ads on television again. Excuse me, I need to take a shower.