The Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce has spoken: State Supreme Court candidate Linda Clifford is an activist who will legislate from the bench while her opponent Annette Ziegler will practice judicial restraint. The WMC message couldn’t be simpler, or more simple-minded: Ziegler good; Clifford bad.
The WMC is on something of a roll: It spent some $2.5 million to get Republican J.B. Van Hollen elected, and was doubtless the decisive factor in a very tight race, enabling Van Hollen to overcome the Democratic wave of November.
Nationally, big business has made the election of Republican state attorneys general a priority, as a Stateline.org article reported last November. In the last election, business interests spent an estimated $10 to $15 million through the Republican Attorneys General Association and a similar amount through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the Democratic Attorneys General Association spent a measly $2 million.
“State attorneys general have been in the spotlight in recent years for taking on big tobacco, corporations such as Microsoft, and even the Bush administration,” the article noted. Top donors hoping to stop this by electing Republican attorney generals included Philip Morris’ parent Altria, casino operator Harrah’s, Pepsi-Cola and AT&T.
But it’s no good crushing those pesky activist attorney generals if you have a state Supreme Court that has decided to “toss the business community overboard in furtherance of its own social agenda” and that operates as a “super-legislature,” as the WMC recently complained about the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This makes the stakes in the Ziegler-Clifford Race “incredibly high for the business community,” the WMC added.
With that in mind, the WMC set out to discover the truth. Sort of. Their press release claims they examined Ziegler’s rulings as a circuit court judge and found, well, nothing. Ziegler was infrequently overturned on appeal, the WMC claimed. But we’re told in a footnote that, when it comes to “possibly relevant civil cases,” Ziegler was overturned twice. Since we’re not told how many of her cases were “possibly relevant,” what percentage of all cases were overturned, or how this compares to the record for other judges, we’re left to wonder what this means.
Beyond that, the WMC offered not one word that analyzed her rulings. But the group is certain Ziegler will suit them because she used the magic words in discussing her candidacy: She will “act with restraint” and “not legislate from the bench.”
Meanwhile, the WMC is certain Clifford is an activist because in 2004 she argued that a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages would violate the U.S. Constitution. So now an activist is someone who wants our laws and amendments to conform to our nation’s founding document? This would tickle James Madison.
Finally, Clifford has received donations from “a long list of plaintiff’s lawyers,” the WMC tut-tutted, while conceding this might “simply reflect her husband’s business colleagues,” since her husband is a medical malpractice lawyer.
Scintillating research, this isn’t. We already knew that Clifford, who once described herself as liberal, is getting more support from Democrats, while Ziegler, who once described herself as a Republican, is getting more support from the GOP.
But judges have been known to surprise us. State Supreme Court Justice Patrick Crooks hasn’t been the conservative some of his supporters imagined he’d be. Clifford, a supporter of Doyle, might turn out to be sympathetic to business, as the governor has been.
As for the sin of activism, the U.S. Supreme Court has committed both kinds, liberal and conservative. As Ziegler has noted, “a conservative activist is just as dangerous as a liberal activist.”
Hmm, maybe Ziegler won’t be as pliable as the WMC wants. For the reality is that the group doesn’t care about activism, but merely wants a pro-business candidate, the more pro the better.
How Tommy Thompson Rewarded Contractors
It was Charlie Sykes, I believe, who dubbed the current governor “Diamond Jim,” to paint him as uniquely beholden to special interests. This was part of a deeply cynical ploy by Sykes, Mark Belling and others to condemn Doyle for doing what Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson did – to a chorus of cheers from talk radio.
An article in the June 2006 issue of Political Research Quarterly looks back at the Thompson era, examining the connection between campaign contributions and awards to contractors. The study looked at the period 1991-2000, a period when “public-private contracting expanded under the directive of…Thompson,” as the author, University of Michigan professor Roland Zullo, writes. One reason Wisconsin was chosen, Zullo notes, is because campaign finance data by name and industry is readily available here through the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
The study looked at Department of Transportation and Department of Administration projects over a 10-year period and found a pattern of campaign donations to Thompson by contractors just before and after contracts were rewarded. “The statistically strong association between the approval of public-private contracts and political donations raises the controversial prospect that firms were able to buy favoritism,” the study concludes.
Companies gave to Thompson for the same reason they now give to Doyle, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, at a similarly obscene level. Yes, there is an ongoing criminal investigation of a potential tie-in between donations to Doyle and contracts awarded, but this is a different time, with a U.S. Attorney, Steve Biskupic, who is far more aggressive than his predecessor Tom Schneider. We’ll see what comes of that investigation. In the meantime, what the Thompson and Doyle eras jointly prove is that multimillion dollar campaigns inevitably undermine the democracy by giving favored treatment to donors.
Short Takes
-If you’re looking for a state that’s big on Pentecostal Christianity, Wisconsin isn’t it. A recent New York Times story reported that Pentecostalism is the world’s fastest-growing branch of Christianity, with roughly 400 million adherents. An accompanying map of the states showed Arkansas had the highest percentage of residents (18%) and Mormon-dominated Utah had the lowest (2%). Wisconsin was among a group of North Central states all at 4%, ranking well below the majority of states.
– Judge Ziegler’s campaign manager, Mark Graul, wrote to complain about my column of last week that noted the missteps in the Ziegler campaign. Graul noted that Ziegler hasn’t herself donated to any Republicans (though her husband and other relatives have). As to Judge Richard Becker, who condemned Ziegler’s appointment to the bench in 1997 as a partisan decision by then Gov. Thompson, Graul notes that Becker is now supporting Ziegler’s bid for the Supreme Court. Finally, Graul notes that Ziegler has the backing of “a number of prominent Democrats.”
The last point is a shocker. Somebody better warn the WMC.
And try Dish on Dining, critic Ann Christenson’s weekly column.
