Democracy Dies…in the Courts?

There's No Accounting for Taste

There’s no accounting for taste, or for the electorate’s decision in 2023 and 2025 to install a radical state Supreme Court majority, but that’s what voters have given us, and now we have to live with all the consequences the progressive justices will likely shower upon us—Act 10 is no doubt stone cold dead, and school choice, even our limited version of it, could well be on the chopping block.

All those possibilities we were quite aware of when we went to the polls Tuesday, and, frankly, voters made their choices knowing full well what the future could bring, whether they happily slurped down her candidacy or voted holding their noses.

What we don’t know is how this radical majority could rule in unforeseen cases that might come before the court—cases that challenge judicial jurisdictional boundaries and even threaten the civil liberties of the state’s residents. How might the court rule in cases where free speech rights are weighed against threats from disinformation, as defined, let’s say, by a hypothetical state disinformation bureau? How might the court rule if a petition comes before the court to ban a candidate from the ballot?

Will due deference to bureaucratic agencies make a comeback, and the court elevate the diktats of the DNR and other powerful agencies? That’s likely, given that the indefinite objection to rules that is so crucial to REINS Act legislative oversight is already living on borrowed time. All of which is to say, the new court has been legitimately elected, but will the new majority use its mandate to employ illegitimate powers that no election could authorize? Unfortunately, looking at the justices own words and deeds, the answer seems to be yes.

What We Know, What We Don’t

While we don’t know in the wake of this week’s election just how far into constitutional encroachment this court will wander, what we do know is that democracy’s fibers are fraying at a dizzying pace around the democratic world—what’s left of it—and much of the dirty work in killing democracy in the name of democracy is being performed by courts, high and low.

That globalist deconstruction of the rule of law is now front and center right here in Wisconsin.

Europe offers useful instruction in how court-driven totalitarianism supplants liberty through the veneer of institutional validity. Across the pond, the European Union (EU) has been striking its authoritarian blows for a long time now, promising years ago to erect a “democracy shield” against those who would destroy freedom, meaning those who disagree with its narratives and with its definition of democracy. And so the EU through its courts, as Vice President JD Vance pointed out so well last month, moved to silence them with a Digital Services Act that bans hate speech.

The shield didn’t prove strong enough, so now courts are banning candidates whom they think might “harm” European democracy from running in elections. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the poster child in Europe of dismantling democratic norms, nationalizing the media, banning opposition parties, and canceling elections outright. He used an administrative court to ban the country’s largest opposition party and seize its assets.

Of course he has the war as an excuse. That’s the problem with those who would end democracy by suspending civil liberties—there’s always an excuse. Always.

The rest of Europe isn’t far behind. In Romania, a conservative candidate, Calin Georgescu, stunned that nation by finishing first in the opening round of balloting. As luck would have it for the European globalists, a constitutional court found him to be too influenced and tainted by Vladimir Putin to be allowed to run, so he was banished. Then along came Diana Șoșoacă, a right-wing and vocal pro-Russian EU MP who was suddenly perceived to be a threat. She was kicked off the ballot, too. She said she would appeal and posted on Facebook that she was living proof she did not live in a democracy.

Kinda hard to argue with that.

As if these episodes were not enough to shatter the myth of European democracy, there was the stunner in France this week, when a court there—yes, a court—barred the most popular politician in the country from running for office for five years. Marine Le Pen, the leader of National Rally, has by far been the frontrunner in that country’s 2027 presidential election. Le Pen was convicted of misappropriating European Union funds, along with more than a score of other National Rally party members. Supposedly, they were guilty of running a fake jobs scam in which lower-level party employees were given EU jobs so they could get more pay and save the party money.

Frankly, it sounds like normal behavior in Washington. These kind of infractions are common enough in the EU, too, and are often made up against political opponents (Le Pen says she is innocent). Even the French court agreed the convictions didn’t warrant sending her to prison and gave her a suspended sentence. So not really serious enough to lock her up but serious enough to lock her off the presidential ballot. Which seems to have been the end game all along. Funny, too, that all the crooks just happen to be on the right.

As journalistGlenn Greenwald put it:

It’s even happening in Brazil, where Greenwald lives: The president there, Lula da Silva, has run into a rough patch with voters, and the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is extraordinarily popular, but once again it turns out he is a threat to democracy—he has been charged with plotting a coup—and has been banned from running.

Mike Benz put it this way on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom: “If you can’t beat them, ban them. They tried to do that to Trump, and they’re doing that with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Le Pen in France, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy, the AFD party in Germany, and Călin Georgescu in Romania.”

What Goes Around, Comes Around

Of course, as Benz observed, all this has already happened here, though we have a sturdier constitutional structure that has allowed the republic to so far endure the progressive assault against it. The lawfare against President Trump, resulting in 34 concocted felony convictions, was designed to perform the same function as those decisions in other countries—to keep him off the ballot.

All that led to attempts in some 20 states to ban Trump from running, and actually succeeded in Colorado when that state’s court banned him for insurrection, until the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.

In stopping that, the U.S. stands out, while Europe has descended into wholesale developing world political hooliganism. But that doesn’t mean the judicial strain of authoritarianism that is now globalism’s front line of defense isn’t alive and active in our own courts, as demonstrated most recently by federal district judges attempting their own coups against the administration through the illegitimate use of national injunctions.

Seizing power from an elected president is just as bad as preventing a political opponent from being elected in the first place.

The next battleground, after the tinpot dictators at the federal district level are slapped down, will inevitably be the state courts, and once again, thanks to Tuesday’s election, Wisconsin will be ground zero. Expect right away an effort by the newly empaneled radical justice and her progressive colleagues to attempt to replicate, in their own way, what the European courts have done—to use their power and their veneer of legitimacy to disempower the people of the state.

In our case, that will be the very people who elected them.

In Europe they ban candidates from the ballot; here, the court will attempt to ban the legislature from legislating and from tethering state bureaucracies to representative accountability. They have already stripped elected lawmakers of substantial oversight authority over the Wisconsin bureaucracy, and that oversight will likely soon be taken completely, and illegitimately, away. Instead of oversight by the people, it will be oversight by four radical justices.

With this court, too, expect actual laws passed by elected representatives to become so much litter to be scattered along the political roadside as the new court assumes its role as the state’s supreme policymaker and lawmaker.

This raw judicial authoritarianism, if and when it happens—and that is what it would be: winning elections does not empower the justices to exercise illegitimate power—must be confronted, and the takeaway from Tuesday is that next year’s elections are more important than ever. The legislature still retains the power of creating and forwarding to the people constitutional amendments that could check the likely coming excesses of this court. And only by electing a Republican governor can the people constrain the bureaucracy the court will now give unchecked power to.

In Europe, where judicial authoritarianism has given the courts a lock on who can run for office and who cannot, the path out of totalitarianism will be long and steep. Here in Wisconsin, it won’t be easy, either. We have just continued to empower a majority that has already shown itself to be a quintessential American example of judicial authoritarianism.

Still, the people here have the ultimate power, if we choose to exercise it. Let’s work to make sure the people do so wisely, by exposing this majority each and every time it steps out of its judicial lane.