Now the Whole Country Knows How Bad the Wisconsin Supreme Court Is

SCOTUS Reverses Wisconsin Supreme Court in Unanimous Decision

Wisconsin now has incontrovertible proof that the four liberal justices who comprise the State Supreme Court’s majority are not jurists at all, but rather political activists in black robes—and not especially effective ones.

The United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, didn’t so much reverse these hacks as it did expose them for what they have always been. When even the notoriously left-wing Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognizes how terrible a court’s ruling is, it must be as bad as it gets.

Writing for all eight of her fellow justices, Sotomayor wrote in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission that the Wisconsin Supreme Court grossly violated Catholic Charities’ First Amendment rights when it denied them a religious exemption to the state’s unemployment tax and, in so doing, treated the organization differently than other religious groups.

“It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion,’” Sotomayor opined. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one.

“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed.”

That was the judicial equivalent of an elbow from the top rope, the sort of smackdown that is rarely seen and reserved only for the most egregiously unconstitutional lower court rulings. The Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t err; it intentionally ignored the First Amendment and a mountain of case law to arrive at a politically and/or personally preferred conclusion.

Catholic Charities filed suit against Wisconsin’s Labor and Review Commission over its requirement that the organization enroll in the state’s unemployment benefits program. Catholic Charities had applied for a religious exemption but was denied. The case ended up at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which upheld this denial.

In so doing, however, the Court’s majority applied a different standard of review for Catholic Charities than other religious organizations, effectually holding it to a higher standard.

“The First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religions and subjects any state-sponsored denominational preference to strict scrutiny,” Sotomayor wrote in the US Supreme Court’s opinion. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s interpretation of [state statutes] imposes a denominational preference by differentiating between religions based on theological lines.”

That sort of preference is both legally unsupported and morally reprehensible. All are equal before the law or else the American system of law collapses. Wisconsin is witnessing that in real time, and alleged Justices Jill Karofsky, Janet Protasiewicz, Rebecca Dallet, and Ann Walsh Bradley are entirely to blame.

They have made a mockery of the Rule of Law with each opinion they write and this state’s only saving grace is that they are too lazy to write many opinions at all. The few they have issued since taking over the majority in 2023 have, however, fundamentally altered the state to suit their own political ambitions.

Within months of seizing power, they struck down Wisconsin’s state legislative map on laughably flimsy legal grounds (taking great care to avoid any federal issues that could lead to a reversal in federal court) and approved a partisan gerrymander that put Democrats on the verge of taking control of the Legislature.

Now they are contemplating a similar decision striking down Wisconsin’s congressional map on equally ridiculous grounds. Alleged Justice Bradley is retiring, but she is giving way to an even more ideologically-minded partisan in Susan Crawford, who all but promised to strike down the state’s congressional maps so that Democrats could pick up two House seats.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court would be wise not to, if only to avoid the deep embarrassment of another 9-0 rebuke. The US Supreme Court would be almost certain to intervene in an attempt to redraw congressional districts more than halfway through the decade, especially when there is no legal basis to do so.

The entire country now knows how embarrassingly bad the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority is; only time will tell if these justices are willing to utterly humiliate themselves again.