Judge Maria Lazar Claims Mantle of Impartiality

Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar speaks at a Feb. 17 forum at the Marquette University law school. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, the conservative candidate in the race for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, has built her campaign around the idea that she will be an independent justice while her opponent, Appeals Court Judge and former Democratic legislator Chris Taylor, will be a partisan actor on the bench.

Lazar has frequently said on the campaign trail that she’s “never been a member of a political party” — a claim aided by the fact that Lazar has never served in partisan office and Wisconsin voters don’t register their party affiliation — while at a recent event Taylor, who served in the state Assembly for nine years, affirmed that she’s a Democrat.

The argument of the Lazar campaign closely mirrors the arguments made by the last two conservative candidates for the Court.

Last year, former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel frequently said that as a justice he’d be like a baseball umpire, simply calling balls and strikes about the law. During the 2023 race, former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly said that if he was elected Wisconsin would have “the rule of law” while if his opponent Janet Protasiewicz were elected Wisconsin would have the “rule of Janet.”

Schimel and Kelly both brought long histories of work on behalf of the Republican party, its allies and its causes to their races. Both rode the argument that they would be impartial arbiters of the law to double digit losses.

But in both of the last two Wisconsin Supreme Court campaigns, the ideological balance of the Court was at stake after years in which Republicans had held control of most of the state’s political levers. Those races broke fundraising records and drew national attention.

Lazar is making her argument this year in a much sleepier race as part of an effort to prevent the Court’s liberals from securing a 5-2 majority. Lazar says it’s important to protect ideological diversity on the Court.

“You don’t want a court that has a point of view, one point of view,” Lazar said at an event in Brown County earlier this month. “You might as well have one judge, one justice. You need people there to be that diversity of thought.”

But like Kelly and Schimel, Lazar’s opponents have argued she’s not as non-partisan as she claims.

Lazar has been endorsed by some of the state’s leading anti-abortion groups, prominent 2020 election deniers and all six of Wisconsin’s Republican members of the House of Representatives. She’s received financial support from major GOP donors including Richard and Liz Uihlein. She has also regularly appeared with far right national political figures and has spoken to right-wing groups across the state.

Her campaign staff includes consultants with deep ties to Wisconsin Republican politics.

“I don’t really care if you’re a member of the Green Party, the Constitution Party, or any party,” Lazar told the Wisconsin Examiner. “You cannot be a member of a party at any point in time and be a judge, because everyone will rightly say, ‘Where are your interests? Are you ruling for the law, or are you ruling for your party?’”

As an attorney for the state Department of Justice, she defended Republican lawmakers in a lawsuit alleging they violated the state’s open meetings laws while passing the controversial anti-union measure that became Act 10. She also defended the gerrymandered 2011 electoral maps that locked in Republican control of the Legislature for more than a decade.

At an event earlier this month, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky said that as a Department of Justice attorney, Lazar carried “the flag of the right-wing interests.”

Opponents have also pointed to appeals court decisions in which Lazar has sided with 2020 election conspiracy theorists trying to gain access to private voter information and with corporate interests trying to weaken the state’s toxic spills law. The District 2 Court of Appeals on which Lazar sits is considered the most reliably conservative appeals court in the state.

After the 2020 presidential election, the state Supreme Court, then controlled by a conservative majority, ruled in a 4-3 decision not to hear a lawsuit from the campaign of President Donald Trump challenging Wisconsin’s election results.

With the Trump White House signaling a willingness to interfere in the conduct of state election systems, Democrats and left-leaning organizations have argued the Supreme Court race this year will build an important barrier against Republicans copying the 2020 playbook in the 2028 presidential election.

Earlier this month, Lazar told PBS Wisconsin she wouldn’t weigh in on the merits of that Trump 2020 case, but that she believes “every legal, valid vote should be counted.”

But in the election disputes that have simmered in Wisconsin during the six years since Trump’s Stop the Steal effort culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the debate has often centered exactly on the question of what counts as a legal, valid vote — a question that the Supreme Court may be called on to answer.

Lazar said it would be shortsighted for a judge or justice to decide an election case “because it helps the side that you most personally align with.”

“A vote is a vote, and I’m not going to get into all the ins and outs of what judges have to look at when they’re determining what’s a legal, valid vote,” she told the Examiner. “But my concern is — and I’m seeing it not just in Wisconsin, I’m seeing it nationally — I’m seeing that this is being treated like a game. It’s a very serious right, and I think it’s an obligation that people vote, and I don’t like seeing anyone disenfranchised for any reason whatsoever.”

The effort to cast doubt on election results was sparked by Trump and led in Wisconsin by Republicans and former conservative Supreme Court justices Currently, Republican members of Congress are debating a bill that could drastically restrict access to the ballot to people unable to produce a certified copy of a birth certificate or other documents proving U.S. citizenship. But Lazar said she sees judges on both sides trying to help their side win.

“I don’t like the fact that courts and justices and judicial candidates are making these arguments and winking and nudging on both sides and saying, ‘Oh, if you elect me, I’m going to make sure that your party is going to win,’ or ‘if you elect me, I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen, or this does.’ That’s inappropriate,” she said.

Observers representing a range of political views have lamented the massive amount of money that has flowed into Wisconsin’s Supreme Court races, which has accelerated the perception that the body is more partisan than it used to be.

Under Wisconsin’s divided government, the Supreme Court has been regularly tasked with deciding disputes over the separation of power between the governor and Legislature. With an open race for governor and competitive legislative races across the state, November’s elections could result in one party trifecta control of the lawmaking branches or give state government a big shakeup that results in a still-divided government under a different layout.

Lazar said a justice deciding these separation of power cases shouldn’t try to game out which party will be helped because in Wisconsin’s swing state politics, the shoe could just as quickly be on the other foot.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she said. “You have to have a long view, and the courts really have the longest view. And we should be looking not to what helps someone today, but we should be saying, ‘how do we affect the appropriate law for generations?’”

In recent years, and especially since the start of Trump’s second term, conservative leaning candidates have not fared well in non-major elections. Democrats and left-leaning judges have performed far better when turnout is lower through a combination of higher motivation against a liberal base eager to cast a protest vote against the unpopular president’s party and the lower engagement in state and local politics among a Republican base that only turns out en masse when Trump is on the ballot.

Lazar said she understands that’s a barrier she has to overcome.

“It does seem to be non-major election years that the April elections seem to be a little sleepier, or they possibly even trend a little bit away from the more conservative candidate, or the more independent, in this case, candidate, and we recognize that,” she said. “Everyone in this state should be looking at this race and looking at what rights they have, and to making sure that they take steps so that they have someone that they can have faith in.”

A Marquette Law School poll released in February found that a large swathe of Wisconsin voters still had very little information about the Supreme Court race. With six weeks before Election Day, 66% of voters said they were still undecided. Among those polled who had decided, Taylor had a slight edge.

But despite Taylor’s slight lead in the poll, Lazar said her takeaway was that the Taylor campaign’s TV ads in the state’s largest metro areas had done little to move the public.

“My opponent has spent a lot of money, run a lot of ads and not gaining any traction,” Lazar said. “And I think it shows that the state of Wisconsin is saying we want to take a step back, maybe a little bit of election fatigue from last year, and we want to take a step back to really make a good, wise decision on who we want to give a 10-year term on this Court.”

Lazar follows conservative candidate playbook in claiming mantle of impartiality was originally published by Wisconsin Examiner.