The State Bar of Wisconsin: An Octopus’s Garden of Left-Wing Ideology

Tentacles Everywhere

So this past week I opened up my email inbox to see a fundraising pitch from Lara Trump for a book company called Brave Books, a company that fights woke ideology. The cause is a good one but what caught my eye was the subject header of the email: “The Left Has Its Tentacles Everywhere.”

Ain’t that true. Sometimes one of those monstrous tentacles wraps itself around our necks and we don’t even know it’s there until it’s too late. The tentacles of bureaucracy and rigid ideology reach into corporate board rooms, into the vast majority of classrooms, into health and medical professional associations, into the media, into nonprofits and churches, and on and on, so much so that the propaganda becomes an almost permeating presence everywhere we turn, bathing all our communities and institutions in its own glowing globalist light.

All of which brings to mind one more place where the left especially has its tentacles: the legal industry, where the profession self-regulates and propagandizes, mostly using, on the state level, mandatory membership fees. The American Bar Association (ABA) is nothing more than a progressive advocacy group, and a looney one at that, while the State Bar of Wisconsin (state Bar), which elects delegates to the ABA, is almost as bad.

The only real difference is that fed-up lawyers can walk away from the ABA, or not join; that’s not so for attorneys who want to practice in Wisconsin. While the capture of bar associations by ideological interests might not be as big as DOGE or school choice in liberating our political souls from woke possession, it’s not insignificant. Captured bar associations are an outsized voice for progressive causes, they pump millions and millions of dollars into social justice initiatives, and they exercise substantial influence on the court system itself, from recommendations on judicial nominees on the national level to outsized political influence and lobbying on the state level, and, in some places, actual regulation of their own industry.

If corporate media is the public relations tentacle of the globalist left and of institutionalized progressivism, then bar associations represent the legal tentacle. Problem is, the organizations are bogus. They are about improving the administration of the courts’ legal services and of advancing the ethics of the profession as much as USAID is about humanitarian aid.

That’s not much.

The ABA: Left wing and let out

On the federal level, the octopus arm otherwise known as the ABA has been busy, busy, busy, resisting the Trump administration. Among other things, the ABA denounced the administration’s attempt to shut-down the CIA-infested USAID, opposed Trump’s initiatives to shut down Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and urged the U.S. Senate to vote against an immigration reform bill to require the detention of noncitizens who commit certain crimes.

Unfortunately for the ABA, the MAGA-MAHA movement has its own tentacles, and this week GOP lawmakers, attorney general Pam Bondi, and new Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson unleashed their own fury, exposing the organization for what it really is, a sham front for the Democratic Party and its progressive allies.

On February 28, Bondi got the party going with a letter to David Brennan, the chairman of the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (wow!), advising him and the council that the previous administration allowed “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination” to spread “throughout every facet of academia” while “proponents of these discriminatory practices” purported to justify them “under the banner” of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Trump would not tolerate such a policy, Bondi warned the council.

“I am writing because, for years, the council—the sole body charged with accrediting American law schools—has subjected law faculties and law students to unlawful race and sex discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity’ mandates, and that policy must be repealed immediately,” Bondi wrote.

The ABA’s protocol for approving law schools requires schools to “demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion,” including a commitment to a student body and faculty that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity, Bondi observed.

“That requirement blatantly violates our nation’s civil rights laws and conflicts with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College,” she wrote.

Bondi said the lawyers’ group might soon need lawyers of their own.

“The Council’s status as the sole accrediting body of American law schools is a privilege, and mandatory diversity objectives are an abuse of that privilege, which is subject to revocation,” she wrote. “Even if it does not come to that, it is unclear how state bars can lawfully continue to require prospective lawyers to attend ABA-accredited law schools if the Council continues to abuse its privilege in this way. The Department of Justice stands ready to take every action necessary to prevent further abuse.”

A week later, GOP senators weighed in with their own hammer blows. U.S. Sens. Eric Schmitt, Mike Lee, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, and Bernie Moreno wrote to William Ray, the ABA president, to express their disappointment over recent statements he made suggesting that Trump was undermining both the rule of law and the legal profession.

“Both lead us to conclude the American Bar Association (ABA) is a biased and ideologically captured institution,” the senators wrote. “We call on our Senate colleagues to disregard the ABA’s recommendations, as well as ratings of judicial nominees and pending legislation. We also call upon President Trump and the Department of Justice to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely.”

What’s more, the senators continued, Ray made his inflammatory claims without citing legal reasoning for his conclusions.

“Our leaders are acting within their constitutional purview,” they wrote.

The lawmakers wrote that they were incredulous that the ABA would stand by in support of USAID, again doing so without legal reasoning.

“The ABA further fails to disclose that the ABA has received millions of dollars in funding from USAID,” they wrote. “It is questionable whether the ABA is committed to defending liberty or its own sources of funding.”

The senators castigated the ABA for not speaking up when the Biden administration launched what they called an all-out war on the Supreme Court by threatening to pack it, in the process simultaneously and unconstitutionally binding a coequal branch of government and putting a target on justices’ backs.

Perhaps most important in the letter was still more revelations about the extreme left-wing takeover of what was once a credible organization, much in the way extremists have captured the Democratic National Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The ABA has embraced divisive, cultural Marxist DEI and woke initiatives: mandating DEI training at law schools, opposing anti-woke legislation, arguing that men should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, and pushing racial quotas in the clerkship hiring process,” they wrote. “Beyond this, the ABA as an organization has filed amicus briefs supporting leftist policy outcomes in seemingly every major Supreme Court case of this century.”

Even in its ratings of judicial nominees and its role in evaluating candidates’ qualifications, the organization had fallen to political, leftist bias, the senators wrote.

“As we saw during the Biden administration, the ABA’s ratings were little more than political endorsements for the most radical, left wing partisans,” they wrote. “The ABA endorsed patently unqualified judicial nominees as ‘Qualified’ or ‘Well Qualified’ time and time again—including nominees that were so partisan that even the Democrat majority in the Senate could not confirm them.”

Unfortunately, the senators concluded, the ABA had shown itself to be an ideologically captured, leftist institution, as many warned in the first Trump administration.

“It is a failed institution that is incapable of impartially rating nominees and making legislative recommendations,” they wrote. “As such, we will not consider any ABA recommendations on pending legislation or nominees, and we call upon our colleagues to do the same.”

On the heels of those letters, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson took action to prohibit political appointees at the FTC from holding leadership roles in the ABA, participating in ABA events, or renewing their ABA memberships. Ferguson said the ABA’s Antitrust Law Section was dominated by defense lawyers at large firms who represent large business interests—the very sort of businesses who often have business before the FTC.

“Big Tech and its apparent capture of the ABA make this risk too great to bear,” Ferguson wrote. “Investigating Big Tech’s monopoly power and censorship practices is one of my highest priorities. But the ABA seems beholden to the interests of Big Tech.”

And to leftist ideologues.

The State Bar of Wisconsin

On the state level, the state Bar is hardly any better ideologically, though the rules of the game are different because membership is mandated to practice law in the state.

In a way, the state Bar (and 30 others like it around the country that are mandatory associations) is even worse because it effectively holds a gun to the head of every attorney in the state: Give us your money or your professional life.

It is also a de facto state agency, if not a formal one, or at least a state-created monopoly. Murky, I know. The Bar likes to stress that it is not a state agency but a private professional association that runs on membership dues. But that’s not how a 1986 attorney general’s opinion saw it: “The State Bar of Wisconsin is a state agency created by the constitutional authority of the supreme court. The authorized functions of the State Bar may come under the ‘State Action’ exemption to the antitrust laws and the procedures employed by the Unauthorized Practice Committee and the Ethics Committee appear to provide due process but specific opinions in this regard must be given on a case-by-case basis.”

It was a wobbly status, to be sure, the attorney general wrote: “However, the supreme court expects ‘the bar to act freely and independently on all matters which promote the purposes for which the bar was integrated’ provided such acts are ‘within the frame work of its rules and by-laws.’”

In the U.S. Supreme Court’s Keller decision, the court also rambled back and forth between arguments about agency, concluding the California Bar certainly wasn’t a traditional agency. And in 1992, when the state Supreme Court re-integrated the bar after four years of non-integration, Wisconsin justice Shirley Abrahamson dissented, observing that the state Bar really didn’t regulate anything like a state agency would, or, for that matter could necessarily speak for the profession any better than any other lawyers’ groups.

Call it an agency or a cartel or a glorified state-supported union, and notwithstanding the state Bar’s existence before integration—not to mention those stretches as a nonintegrated entity in the intervening years—the mandatory state Bar is without question a government creation, a limb or accessory of the state that compels every attorney to pay it membership dues. As such, it reaps the benefit of state largesse, political if not financial. It is wholly a misnomer to call it a private professional association.

That’s like saying inmates belong to a private justice-involved club whom the government just so happened to force them to join. In this state, lawyers can’t walk out of their jail cells any more than corrections’ inmates can. Even less so because they are never be paroled and set free.

Whatever it is formally, the Bar most certainly is a government entity, and the mandatory rule embeds the association—and its ideology—into the framework of the state’s judicial system. They don’t call it integrated for nothing.

One way they do that is through influence. They use their compelled dues to finance their political and legal voice, and that voice is legitimized and presented as speaking for the legal profession as the unified body best suited for passing judgment on everything from the death penalty to abortions. They use their funds to produce reports, not just about the administration of the courts but about their favorite policies.

They lobby on behalf of the cartel, though not necessarily on behalf of their dues-paying members. The dues they collect allows them to occupy prime political real estate and they position favored members to rise to the top of the profession, some times to elected partisan office, more often as judges worming their way higher and higher in the judicial system.

And the politics and politicians they are pushing to the top? It’s unabashed leftist rot. One need to look no further than the Bar’s 2022 annual report—the latest on its website—to see that DEI is one of its top priorities:

Yeah, about that Diversity Clerkship Program. Last year, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against discriminatory practices at the Bar, including funding internships based on race. In a settlement in the case, WILL announced that the Bar agreed to change the definition of ‘diversity,’ and to allow all law students to participate in the Bar’s diversity clerkship program.

Amazingly, the Bar responded by saying they would rewrite the definition, but, nah, we’re not actually going to change the race-based program:

“The State Bar of Wisconsin's Diversity Clerkship Program will continue unchanged, despite what the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) is publicly claiming. … In fact, the State Bar’s Diversity Clerkship Program is continuing without any change in its operation.”

For the state Bar, if reality doesn’t fit, just call it something else. Don’t want to be called a state agency or cartel or state-created monopoly? Just call yourself a private professional association. Don’t want to be sued for race discrimination? Don’t change what you’re doing, just change what you say you’re doing.

Over the past decade, multiple lawsuits have challenged the state Bar’s mandatory dues on First Amendment grounds, but so far attempts to decouple its radical ideology from the framework of representative government have not succeeded. Those cases deserve examination both because of the unconstitutional nature of the mandatory requirement—that needs its own column and beyond the scope of this one—and, for the purpose here, because they expose the leftist colors of the Bar as a comrade in league with the radical ABA.

In 2019, WILL represented Adam Jarchow, now a former lawmaker, and Michael Dean in their challenge of the mandatory requirement. They lost and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case on appeal, but the original complaint catalogued a raft of left-wing causes the state Bar promoted that Jarchow did not agree with and did not want to fund with his dues.

In March 2019, for example, the complaint pointed to the state Bar’s statement applauding the governor’s proposal to address the “state’s justice gap,” by continuing to fund civil legal services.

The state Bar also actively opposed legislation relating to “prohibiting coverage of abortions through health plans sold through exchanges,” the complaint stated.

In 2017, the state Bar urged the restoration of funding for the Legal Services Corporation eliminated in Trump’s proposed 2018 federal budget, the complaint continued. In 2009, it actively supported an unsuccessful bill to restore the voting rights of felons, and it also supported an unsuccessful effort to end a spiritual exception to child abuse law.

Then, too, the complaint continued, the state Bar opposed requiring law enforcement agencies to collect a biological specimen for DNA analysis from every adult who was arrested for a felony and every juvenile who was taken into custody for certain sexual assault offenses that would be felonies if committed by an adult. And the state Bar opposed opposes reinstatement of the death penalty.

Thankfully, many of the state Bar’s initiatives never became law.

WILL is also representing Daniel Suhr in an ongoing lawsuit alleging violation of Suhr’s free speech rights in an attempt to end the state Bar’s funding of political causes with his dues.

In this lawsuit, according to the amended complaint, the plaintiff homed in on the state Bar’s “Leadership Development Summit” and its “Leadership Academy," which WILL and Suhr allege confer a credential, offer a privileged path to coveted leadership positions, and grant unique access to prominent figures, such as former Gov. Jim Doyle and Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky, as well as a “lawyer-to-lawyer mentoring program, which purportedly matches new attorneys with experienced mentors.”

There’s another clear example of the tentacle pushing the favored and the entitled toward power.

“Whether an attorney is granted one of these credentials and placed on a privileged path to leadership is not decided on merit alone,” the complaint states. “Rather, the selection processes discriminate between attorneys based on various protected traits, primarily race.”

As such, the programs are illegal and unconstitutional, the complaint asserted. Again, this lawsuit is about the compelled speech and compelled association and is beyond the scope of this column. But this lawsuit, too, shines a light on the state Bar’s ideological territory.

“The Bar also engages in several other non-germane activities to which plaintiff objects,” the complaint states. “Like the programs, some of these activities include divisive rhetoric. For example, the Bar lambasts police on its website, claiming that ‘[b]lack Americans suffer from police brutality . . . caused by systemic racism . . . that is ingrained in our legal system . . . . This is unacceptable. Black Lives Matter.””

According to the complaint, the Bar has published numerous articles in its magazine, the Wisconsin Lawyer, and on its website promoting its race-centric worldview.

“In one such article, an attorney lamented about how he ‘practiced estate planning and long-term care planning for close to three decades’ but had ‘not consistently ask[ed] questions about a client’s racial or ethnic background,’” the complaint states.

The state Bar also publishes other articles in the Wisconsin Lawyer, which are not germane to regulating the legal profession or improving the practice of law, the complaint states.

“Among other things, these articles take stances on controversial issues and give advice about the business of law—rather than its practice,” the complaint asserts.

And then there was this.

“At a recent event as a part of the Diversity Counsel Program, one speaker, a state circuit court judge, gave a speech,” the complaint states. “This judge complained that while walking to her chambers, she had to ‘look[] down’ a hallway that had ‘a row of white men that goes from one end to the other.’ This ‘row of white men’ is a series of portraits of previous judges.”

Another speaker, according to WILL and Suhr, advised that employers ask themselves how many board members of color there were and how many board members who identify as LGTBQIA+.

“Another speaker called “the notion of a colorblind constitution, propounded by justice John Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), . . . a non-sequitur . . . .,” the complaint states.

Whatever the state Bar is, it is violating the free speech rights of many of its member. The monopoly structure of its funding mechanism allows it to advance its progressive vision while disadvantaging oppositional voices and perhaps alternative organizations. It is one more way the left infuses propaganda into everyone’s life and into every industry and profession.

“The Bar effectively claims to speak on behalf of all members as if it were a voluntary association—but it is not,” the WILL/Suhr complaint states. “ …For as long as the Bar is engaged in activities that are political, ideological, or not germane to either regulating the legal profession or improving the quality of legal services, compelled membership is unconstitutional.”

Ending mandatory Bar associations and defenestrating the national ABA is one more necessary step to restoring truly free speech in our state and society as a whole. Here in Wisconsin, pressure to accomplish this should placed on the shoulders of the Supreme Court, which has the authority to repeal the mandatory rule.

Dismantling these organizations is one more thing to put on the MAGA/MAHA to-do list, especially at the state level as the GOP does the deconstruction on the federal level. 

Like USAID, the state Bar is only a facade behind which left-wing ideologues manipulate and lobby and practice their craft of subversion. 

It’s time to put a stop to it.