Vos at a loss

The Wisconsin Assembly speaker’s clumsy moves on impeachment seem aimed at delay

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For once Assembly Speaker Robin Vos doesn’t seem to know which way to turn. 

A few weeks ago he floated the idea of impeaching newly seated liberal Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she could even say which way she would vote on a single case. 

I didn’t think he was really floating anything. I have a grudging respect for the speaker’s political acumen. I figured he wouldn’t have mentioned impeachment if he didn’t intend to go through with it and knew he had the votes to pull it off. In large part I thought that because, by putting it out there, he got the hard-right all fired up about it and there was no way he could back down. 

Then a funny thing happened. Members of his caucus started to publicly say they had reservations about impeachment. In fact, in a survey conducted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel none of the 64 Assembly Republicans would commit to voting to impeach. Because of his huge majority Vos has the ability to let over a dozen of those members vote against it and still have enough votes, but some of those members probably don’t want to take a vote on this at all.

If they vote against it they could be primaried by the hard right. If they vote for it they run the risk of losing a general election, probably over the potent abortion issue. Republicans have been taking a beating at the polls over their hard-line anti-abortion stance and impeachment can be easily cast as an anti-choice vote, even though Vos has put it in the context of redistricting. 

Also, while it hasn’t been reported in the press, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Vos has gotten pressure from national Republicans to back down. That’s because lighting even a bigger fire under pro-choice voters is likely to turn Wisconsin from a battleground state to an easy win for Joe Biden and it could turn two Congressional districts, the third and the first, blue. 

That’s an important subtext to all this. Vos is pushing impeachment over what Protasiewicz had to say during her campaign about redistricting. She called the current gerrymandered maps “rigged.” (Supreme Court candidates are discouraged from describing things to be as they are.) But most voters don’t care all that much about gerrymandering. They’re against it, but it’s not a motivating factor for those who wouldn’t already vote for Democrats for other reasons. Not so with abortion. That issue motivates Democrats, makes nominal Republicans think twice, and pushes independents to the blue team. 

Vos would just as soon the abortion issue go away. He’s not going to say it out loud, but I’m pretty sure he’d be fine with the court doing what it is likely to do with its new liberal majority, which is to strike down our state’s restrictive 1849 law. That would go a long way toward defusing a big liability for his party in Wisconsin. In fact, it might turn the tables, making abortion opponents doubly motivated to give Republicans the two-thirds majorities they need in both houses to override a veto from Gov. Tony Evers on a new anti-abortion statute. 

So, in Vos’ perfect world, Protasiewicz would vote on abortion and not vote on gerrymandering. How to accomplish that? Delay. So, the game might never have been about actually convicting and removing Protasiewicz since that would only give Evers a chance to appoint another liberal. The idea was probably to impeach her in the Assembly, so that she couldn’t vote, and let the case languish in the Senate. The Senate might eventually even acquit her, but too late to change the maps for 2024. 

But now that strategy seems to have fallen to a rebellion in Vos’ own caucus. So last week Vos tossed out two seemingly desperate gambits. 

First, he suddenly decided that the nonpartisan redistricting commission model, a la Iowa, was just a great idea. Vos has been saying for more than a decade now that Republicans owe their big majorities not to rigged maps but to superior candidates. No need to have fairer maps. Democrats just needed to get better candidates. 

But if Vos had a sincere change of heart, why then did he schedule an Assembly vote for last Thursday, just 48 hours after he introduced his bill? Why didn’t he allow the bill to be referred to a committee where it could be vetted and get a public hearing? Why didn’t he check in with Evers and the Democratic minority leaders and try to get their support? And why did he fill his legislation with landmines, like requiring only a simple majority to reject nonpartisan maps and install gerrymandered ones? 

Vos’ uncharacteristically clumsy move earned him ridicule, not just from Democrats, but even from good government groups and newspapers that have been pushing the Iowa model for decades. 

Then the very next day he followed up with yet another Hail Mary. He announced the formation of a panel of three retired Supreme Court justices which would evaluate whether or not Protasiewicz committed any impeachable offenses. Then it turned out that the panel would be secret. Vos wouldn’t say who would be on it. Only retired Justice David Prosser admitted that he had been asked to serve, but he said he didn’t know what the process would be or how long it would take. 

It didn’t take long for the press to dust off accounts of Prosser’s lengthy record of refusing to recuse himself on questions that involved campaign donors or on issues where bills had been passed while he presided as Assembly speaker. These reports suggested that Prosser would be blatantly hypocritical if he were to find that Protasiewicz could be impeached for maybe doing once what he had done without a doubt over and over again. 

That, combined with Prosser’s comment that this would take “more than a few weeks,” again suggests that Vos doesn’t care about the outcome. He simply wants to be able to run out the whole impeachment process so that it gets too late to change the maps in time for the next round of legislative elections. 

All-in-all, these latest turns of events make Vos look like a guy who’s flailing around, looking for some kind of foothold to save his rigged (well, they are) majorities in the Legislature. There seem to be new developments every other day, but as of this writing it sure looks like the liberals and the Democrats have the upper hand. 

Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.