Judge Joe Donald’s campaign to be a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is clear: Donald isn’t running to be a conservative or liberal justice.
It is a major pillar of his campaign. “The last thing our court needs is another conservative justice or another liberal justice,” says one of his ads.
Unfortunately, the rest of his campaign isn’t nearly as clear. In the rush to tell us who he isn’t, Donald’s campaign has told us very little about who he is.
Don’t get me wrong, Donald has an impressive resume coming into this election. He has served for 20 years as a judge. He was an architect of an innovative drug treatment court in Milwaukee County that has kept a lot of young people out of prison. A disproportionate number of these people were young black men. We have no shortage of people who point fingers and whine about Wisconsin’s shameful disparities, but Donald is one of the few who have done something about it.
But it is a pretty big leap from Circuit Court to Wisconsin Supreme Court. They are very different jobs with very different duties. And I don’t think Donald has done enough to explain the approach he would take in his new job.
In a press release, Donald says he wants “a Supreme Court and judicial system that gives everybody a fair shake.”
That’s a nice sentiment, but what does it mean? What is a “fair shake” when polluters challenge their fines in court? What is a “fair shake” when a woman is suing because she feels her right to choose has been unjustly restricted?
Donald dodged a question about a case that reflects his judicial philosophy in a recent interview with Isthmus, instead choosing to highlight his role in the creation of the drug treatment court. That court is amazing work. Important work. But it doesn’t give me a clear view of the philosophy of a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.
To find something that gave me an idea of Donald’s philosophy, I had to hunt down excerpts from a panel interview the candidates did with the Milwaukee Bar Association. In the Q & A session, Donald offers his support for the increased use of expungement as a tool in Wisconsin courts. Now we are getting somewhere! Expungement is a powerful tool. With expungement, people — including a disproportionate number of black males — don’t need to have a youthful indiscretion turn into a criminal record. That criminal record acts as an albatross for the rest of their lives.
Wisconsin’s expungement statutes are currently very strict. Donald’s response gives me an idea of how he would vote if an issue related to expungement or the sealing of criminal records were to make it to our state’s highest court.
From that short statement, I see much more about what Justice Joe Donald would look like. and I like what I see.
Independence is not a bad thing and fitting neatly into one of two boxes shouldn’t be a requirement to hold office. I also acknowledge that “Technically-a-Justice” Rebecca Bradley and Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg are similarly evasive with their answers. But, given their backgrounds, I have a reasonably good guess how they’d vote on practically any issue. Precisely because they want to be different from the norm, independent candidates face a greater demand to define their positions.
Let’s view the candidates as restaurants. The other two candidates, with their more easily identifiable partisan views, represent chain restaurants. Bradley is Arby’s and Kloppenburg is Culver’s. I don’t like Arby’s. I like Culver’s a lot but don’t get crazy excited to eat there. The main appeal of chain restaurants is that I always know what I’m getting.
Joe Donald is advertising himself as some small, locally owned restaurant I’ve never heard of before. What little information there is on the restaurant’s website looks interesting, but there’s no picture of the menu. I have no idea what my meal is going to look like. This restaurant advertises itself as fusion cuisine, which tells me next to nothing other than the fact that it might differ from Arby’s or Culver’s. Some trusted reviewers like the restaurant. But, once again, the reviewers don’t really tell me what I should expect.
I might take a chance and try this restaurant. Because the worst that is going to happen is that I’m going to have one bad meal. But a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice serves for 10 years, and incumbents have a near 100% reelection rate. Donald could be in office for 20 to 30 years — that is a long time for a blind bet.
Joe Donald is a good man and a good judge. He has a week to convince us why he’d be a good justice.
