Hack judge shits in her pants over prospect of Wisconsin holding democratic legislative elections
We will, alas, almost certainly never know what it would be like for Sam Alito to be part of a minority faction of the Court. But we can get a good approximation of what it would be like from one of his dimmer imitators:
The new judge won a state election on the issue of abortion and gerrymandered maps. Now she is being threatened with impeachment by the GOP. But her opponent was no different in being clear about his views. Indeed, he had defended the gerrymander in court. https://t.co/LuW3o8ugDU pic.twitter.com/bYNF5sgC1E— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) August 18, 2023
The idea that the DEMOCRAT PARTY has an unfair advantage if Republicans can’t turn 49% of the vote into 65% of the seats is both insane and pretty much the view of all Republican elites. They’re terrified of democracy and they’re often not wrong to be.
And there’s plenty more where this came from:
Bradley’s reaction, however, has been far more extreme. She’s used comments to reporters, tweets, and even official court opinions to launch baseless attacks on the legitimacy of the majority’s actions—criticizing them for partisanship and bias in ways that reflect her own partisanship and bias.
From the first day of the Supreme Court’s new liberal majority, Bradley’s core criticism is that its members are too partisan and biased. She criticized her fellow justices as “political hacks” and “politicians wearing robes,” not “jurists.” She argued on Twitter that their firing of the state courts director was a “[p]olitical purge[] of court employees”—a point that she made while retweeting one of the state’s most prominent right-wing commentators.
And this week, when the Supreme Court allowed a case challenging the state’s gerrymandered state legislative districts to proceed, Bradley dissented in furious fashion. She charged that the majority had agreed to hear the case—which in this case included not only the liberals but also fellow conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn—as part of a plan to “shift power away from Republicans and bestow an electoral advantage for Democrat candidates.” Her screed even deployed a favorite slur of Republican partisans by referring to the “Democrat Party.”
But for Bradley, this is nothing new.
Bradley was first appointed to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. She won reelection in 2013 by defeating—in a gigantic irony—Protasiewicz, her future colleague on the Supreme Court. Walker elevated her to the Court of Appeals in 2015, and then to the Supreme Court later that same year. She was reelected to a 10-year term in 2016 against another familiar name: Joanne Kloppenburg, who had narrowly lost the state’s 2011 Supreme Court election.
During Bradley’s 2016 campaign against Kloppenburg, many of her old writings for her college newspaper surfaced, revealing some deeply intolerant views. In 1992, during the height of the AIDS crisis, Bradley wrote that gay people “essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior.”
She also criticized the attention that AIDS received over diseases like cancer, writing, “How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments,” and attacked people who were comfortable with homosexuality as “degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior.” She called abortion a “holocaust of our children” and said she found it “incomprehensible” that anyone could claim “a right to murder their own flesh and blood.”
Even knowing that projection constitutes a huge percentage of Republican discourse, Bradley accusing anyone else of being a partisan hack is something else. This will be a fun total meltdown to watch, and the best part is that unlike Alito she doesn’t serve with life tenure.