The Wisconsin Supreme Court Chose Democrats’ Redistricting Map But Conservatives Still Won — Here’s How‘Evers won!’ read the headlines — but how did he win? By drawing maps that had the fewest changes from Republican maps.
BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL
MARCH 04, 2022
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court adopted Gov. Tony Evers’ congressional and legislative redistricting maps on Thursday in what looks, on the surface, like a big win for Democrats. What the news headlines won’t tell you, though, is how conservatives largely won the redistricting battle before it began.
The 4-3 decision, which prompted a “hell yes” from Evers and featured the court’s conservative swing vote Brian Hagedorn siding with the bench’s liberal judges, doesn’t appear to be a win for the right. Yet the devil’s in the details.
Redistricting is a process predictably fraught with intense bickering as the parties each seek to advantage themselves politically with maximum congressional apportionment. But in Wisconsin, while Evers and Republican legislators were fighting over the maps, one proactive group was quietly devising a legal strategy to box out activist federal judges from manipulating the redistricting process when it inevitably reached the courts.
From restricting which court could hear the case to limiting what factors judges would be allowed to consider in their decision, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty successfully set the rules of the game so progressive jurists couldn’t unconstitutionally hijack the process from the states and become the social justice cartographers of district maps — and it worked.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/04/the-wisconsin-supreme-court-chose-democrats-redistricting-map-but-conservatives-still-won-heres-how/
