(The Center Square) – The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a pair of motions to intervene in a pair of cases challenging the state’s congressional maps.
The group is arguing the maps have long been confirmed as valid and the Wisconsin Supreme Court had already rejected attempts to overturn the maps before it sent the current challenges to three-judge panels last week.
WILL argued the challenges are a politically motivated ploy to overturn maps drawn by a Democrat, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
“Revisiting congressional lines this way, less than a year before the election, sows irreparable distrust in our country’s political process,” WILL Deputy Counsel Lucas Vebber said in a statement. “We intervened on behalf of several Wisconsin voters to argue that overturning the current maps in this manner and imposing new ones would violate federal law and the U.S. Constitution.”
Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in the ruling that he did not agree with how the three-judge panels were selected, saying “To avoid litigants simply choosing their preferred venue and judge, the statute requires the appointment of a three-judge panel with each judge coming from a different judicial circuit, and then requires that venue be assigned to one of those circuits.”
Justice Annette Ziegler called the selections “hand picking circuit court judges to perform political maneuvering.”
Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights and former policy director for Gov. Scott Walker, told The Center Square that it is surprising the court would even consider a map challenge at this point, in the middle of a 10-year congressional map timeline after several challenges were already unsuccessful.
“If the court was gonna consider it, you hand-pick a three-judge panel that we’ve seen in both of these cases and now the blazing fast speed at which the panels are proceeding is deeply disconcerting,” Suhr said. “It just seems it’s so blatantly obvious that it’s politics that is driving a decision to file these cases under this progressive majority on the court.”
WILL was involved in the maps previously when it filed an action after the 2020 U.S. Census asking stating that the existing maps were malapportioned.
Following that action, four maps were submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, including maps from Gov. Tony Evers and the state’s Republican Congress members. Ultimately, the court chose Evers’ maps.
One question now becomes what will occur when maps are redrawn following the 2030 Census.
“I think part of what’s so frustrating here is the lack of stability in the law,” Suhr said. “It’s supposed to be the Legislature that draws the map, the state constitution is very clear.”
