As part of Republicans’ nationwide assault on voting rights, Wisconsin right-wingers pushed for a liberal justice on the state Supreme Court to recuse from a crucial redistricting case in which she could cast the tiebreaking vote. Rejecting recusal, Justice Janet Protasiewicz cited opinions from a litany of Republican judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s recent decision not to recuse from a tax case.  

“As Justice Alito has emphasized: ‘When there is no sound reason for a Justice to recuse, the Justice has a duty to sit,’” Protasiewicz wrote in orders published Friday. Alito had participated in fawning interviews published in The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section that were conducted by a lawyer who was pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, which the justices then agreed to hear for this term.

Protasiewicz, on the other hand, was asked to recuse by Republicans because, on her way to winning her seat in a pivotal election this year, she got campaign contributions from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and said the state’s legislative maps were “gerrymandered,” “rigged” and “unfair.”

In her 47-page explanation for not recusing, Protasiewicz noted that the money hadn’t come from a party to the redistricting case, which was brought by individual citizens who want their legislative maps un-gerrymandered. Regarding her map statements, among the things she cited was a Supreme Court opinion written by another GOP appointee, Antonin Scalia.

“I simply expressed my personal opinions as permitted by” the 2002 case Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, she wrote. There, Scalia wrote for the GOP-appointed majority that it was a violation of the First Amendment to bar judicial candidates from stating their views on disputed legal and political issues.   

Underscoring that the gerrymandering issue is about entrenching and wielding power — a particularly pronounced problem in Wisconsin — state Republicans have threatened to impeach Protasiewicz. She won her election earlier this year in a landslide over conservative Daniel Kelly, who had been appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. In yet another name-check of a Republican appointee that doubled as an own of Kelly, Protasiewicz cited Chief Justice John Roberts’ questioning of whether a campaign contribution has any effect in such a landslide election.

“I won by a landslide,” she wrote of her pivotal victory that determined ideological control of Wisconsin’s high court.

Not that any of these citations would stop Republicans from trying to impeach her, but Protasiewicz’s lengthy recitation — in which she also suggested that her recusal would raise recusal issues for her conservative colleagues — would serve as a monument to their hypocrisy if they do.

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