Over at his new gig at the Wisconsin Reporter, Kevin Binversie put up the most-exhaustive take yet on the Supreme Rumble. I’ll give you the last three paragraphs to whet your whistle:
There are a lot of factors here, all of which are along the lines of stupid and petty. So stupid and petty, you’d think we were dealing with toddlers and not some of the most respected legal minds in the state of Wisconsin.
Yes, Prosser has a temper and a short fuse. This is a well-known and documented fact since his Assembly days. However, what’s lost in a lot of the coverage is the apparent sycophantic defense Walsh Bradley has for Chief Justice Abrahamson if the “she charged him version” of the events is true.
The battle of factions within the Wisconsin Supreme Court is well-known in both the state’s legal and political circles; but now it’s to a point that public back-stabbing and reports of physical altercations only help feed growing concern the court is teetering into professional dysfunction. Somewhere, someone has to be the adult in the room; but from the look of things, we’re a long way from that with the justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The battle of the factions really started to boil over when Justice Michael Gabelman defeated appointed Justice Louis Butler in 2008. Since then, Abrahamson, Bradley and Patrick Crooks have done everything they could to remove Gabelman from the Court, going so far as to ignore the recommendation of the Wisconsin Judicial Commission that an allegation of false political advertising against Gabelman in that campaign did not warrant action by the Court, which prompted the “intemperate” remark from Prosser behind closed doors and leaked from a Bradley e-mail.
