More Like Hagedorn, Please

Here’s the test of a good Supreme Court justice. We have a good idea of what their political leanings are. But they read the law and the filings and they decide the case in the opposite direction of what you’d expect.

I have been mildly but pleasantly surprised that some of the convicted felon Donald Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court have done that. Amy Coney Barrett has shown herself to be conservative, but somewhat independent as has Brett Kavanaugh in some cases. Not a Trump appointee, but Chief Justice John Roberts can be fair-minded at least some of the time, though he’s also mindful of history as, like it or not, what happens on his watch will be known as the Roberts Court.

But the Wisconsin Supreme Court has only one truly principled justice: conservative Brian Hagedorn. Last week Hagedorn recused himself from a case involving Act 10, much to the chagrin of Republicans who were counting on him to be a vote to uphold the law which restricts public employee bargaining rights.

In a thoughtful statement, Hagedorn first made the case that recusal should be used rarely. He’s not on the Court to duck issues. But then he wrote, “Nonetheless, recusal is not optional when the law commands it. After reviewing the filings and the various ethical rules I am sworn to uphold, I have concluded that the law requires me to recuse from this case. The issues raised involve matters for which I provided legal counsel in both the initial crafting and later defense of Act 10, including in a case raising nearly identical claims under the federal constitution.”

As a lawyer for then Gov. Scott Walker, Hagedorn drafted the bill that became Act 10. That seems like an obvious conflict. But Justice Janet Protasiewicz crossed the line during her campaign and said how she would rule on both this case and on the abortion case surely to come before the Court. She may recuse herself from the Act 10 case now, but only because, with Hagedorn also on the sidelines, she’ll know that the liberals will still have a 3-2 advantage. On the other hand, she probably won’t. If she recuses from Act 10 she’d also have to recuse from the abortion case and Hagedorn will still be sitting for that one.

Aside from Hagedorn, this Court is pretty awful. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley are snarky, ultra-conservative, partisan bulldogs while the liberal majority of Justices Rebecca Dallett, Jill Karofsky, Ann Walsh Bradley and Janet Protasiewicz has been predictable in their rulings and petty in their court administration. For no good reason, they summarily fired the state’s court administrator last August, literally within moments of taking the majority, and installed their own hack. Then, while knowing that retired Justice David Prosser was near death, they stripped his name from the state Law Library and named it after an obscure woman who happened to be the first graduate of the UW Law School simply to do a little PC virtue signaling while rubbing the noses of the Court conservatives in it.

Hagedorn won’t be on the ballot again until 2029, if he chooses to seek a second term. But sign me up. I will happily vote for him, even though his politics are far to my right, because he acts the way a Justice should.

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