Wisconsin
Republican lawmakers ask Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider redistricting ruling – Wisconsin Examiner
Wisconsin Republicans have asked the state Supreme Court to reconsider its decision to overturn the state’s legislative maps, saying lawmakers can’t draw new maps by the Court’s Jan. 12 deadline.
In a motion filed last week, the attorneys for Senate Republicans argued the lawmakers wouldn’t be able to hit the Jan. 12 deadline to produce new maps that follow the Court’s order that districts be contiguous.
“And now, announced the Friday before Christmas, the parties have been given 21 days — a third of them falling on weekends and state holidays — to submit proposed remedies, lengthy remedial briefs, and expert reports,” the Republican attorneys state in a filing. “The message is clear: The regular rules apply to Republicans. But here, Democrats get special solicitude.”
The Republicans also argue that the Court didn’t listen to their arguments, pre-decided the case and didn’t give them a chance to respond to the deadline for new maps.
On Dec. 22, the Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that Wisconsin’s current maps are unconstitutional because they include many districts that aren’t contiguous — a requirement under the state constitution. The Court ordered the Legislature and the other parties involved in the lawsuit to submit new maps by Jan. 12, with supporting arguments due 10 days later.
In order to be in place in time for the 2024 legislative elections, the maps must be set by mid-March, state election officials have said.
The maps submitted by the parties will also be assessed by two referees the Court has appointed: University of California, Irvine political science professor Bernard Grofman and Carnegie Mellon University postdoctoral fellow Jonathan Cervas.
For more than a decade, despite Wisconsin’s near 50-50 political divide, Republicans have enjoyed a disproportionately large majority in both houses of the Legislature because of the severe partisan gerrymander they instituted in 2011. That gerrymander, which experts have often cited as one of the worst in the country, was continued in 2022 when the Supreme Court, then under a conservative majority, imposed maps drawn by the Legislature.
In addition to their request that the state Supreme Court reconsider its decision, Republicans have also suggested plans to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That course of action, however, would require Republicans to find a violation of federal law in a case and decision that are almost entirely focused on issues of state law.
“We will pursue all federal issues arising out of the redistricting litigation at the U.S. Supreme Court,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said in a statement after the state Court’s decision.
Before the decision, Republicans suggested that they would challenge Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s participation in the case at the U.S. Supreme Court.
For months, Republicans alleged Protasiewicz had “pre-judged” the case because of comments about the legislative maps she made on the campaign trail and donations her campaign received from the state Democratic Party. Republicans threatened that if she didn’t recuse from the case, they’d move to impeach her.
Protasiewicz denied the request for recusal, saying that the Democratic Party wasn’t a litigant in the case so its political donations to her didn’t affect the case and that recusing because of donations from one party would set a difficult precedent for the other members of the Court who have received campaign cash from either of the parties.
The impeachment threat has subsided, but Republicans could argue in federal court that her participation violated their due process rights.
Such an argument would be made under a federal precedent set in a 2009 Supreme Court case, Caperton v. Massey. In Caperton, a West Virginia judge had refused to recuse himself from the appeal of a $50 million jury verdict after the CEO of the plaintiff in the case had donated $3 million to the judge’s campaign.
In addition to the facts in the case being different, the Caperton precedent was set by a liberal majority, so the current conservative leaning U.S. Supreme Court — which has regularly ruled in favor of money in politics — might be hesitant to endorse its argument.
Other federal claims could be made after the maps are chosen. In the legal battle that led to the imposition of the current maps, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to say the Wisconsin Supreme Court couldn’t select legislative maps drawn by Gov. Tony Evers because they violated the Voting Rights Act by attempting to create too many majority-minority districts around Milwaukee.
Vos said he expects a similar outcome this time.
“Last time around, the Democrats’ maps racially gerrymandered voters to obtain a political goal,” he said. “I expect they’ll do so again. The Supreme Court wasn’t fooled by the overt racial gerrymandering before, and it’s my hope that the Court will refuse to allow that or any other violation of federal law this time around, too.”
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New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
Wisconsin
Former Wisconsin judge to be sentenced after conviction in obstructing arrest of Mexican immigrant
Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted of felony obstruction for helping an immigrant evade federal officers in a case that highlighted President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday in federal court.
Dugan, 67, faces up to five years in prison after a jury convicted her on Dec. 19. She resigned from her position as a Milwaukee County circuit judge two weeks later amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. She had been a judge for nine years.
Trump administration tried to make an example out of Milwaukee judge
The Trump administration brought the case against Dugan as the president pressed ahead with his sweeping immigration crackdown. Trump’s administration and his allies branded Dugan as an activist judge, while Dugan’s attorneys said during the trial that the Trump administration was trying to make an example out of Dugan to “crush her.”
Immigrant rights advocates and other Dugan allies argued that the administration was trying to use her case to blunt judicial opposition to Trump’s immigration efforts. The case became a bellwether nationally in the conflict between the judiciary and Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a fierce Trump loyalist running for Wisconsin governor, urged authorities to “lock her up” in a social media post following her conviction.
Dugan’s attorneys declined to comment ahead of the sentencing. Dugan did not testify during her trial, but her attorneys said she would be making comments to the court on Wednesday. That would be her first public comments on the case in more than a year.
Prosecutors push for ‘serious sentence’
Dugan’s attorneys argued that as a judge she was immune from prosecution. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, who will hand down the sentence, has rejected attempts by Dugan to vacate her obstruction conviction.
Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memo filed last week that Dugan violated her oath as a judge and put both law enforcement and the public at risk.
“Judges are entrusted with tremendous discretion, but there is a line they cannot cross,” Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling wrote. “The defendant crossed that line.”
Dugan’s attorneys argued she has “punished enough,” including resigning as a judge and facing threats of violence. They argued in her sentencing memo that she should not be sentenced to any jail time besides the part of one day she already spent in federal custody.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, the presentence report calls for 15 to 21 months behind bars. The judge is not bound by those guidelines.
Prosecutors said the average sentence for obstruction cases is 16 months, but they did not recommend a sentence.
“This was a serious offense, and it warrants a correspondingly serious sentence,” Frohling wrote.
No matter what she is sentenced to, Dugan’s attorneys said they plan to file an appeal.
Dugan’s case was a first for Wisconsin
Dugan’s case marked the first time that a state judge in Wisconsin went to trial on charges of obstructing immigration agents. She was found not guilty of concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor.
On April 18, 2025, immigration officers went to the Milwaukee County courthouse after learning 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz had reentered the country illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state battery case.
Dugan confronted agents outside her courtroom and directed them to the chief judge’s office because she told them their administrative warrant wasn’t sufficient grounds to arrest Flores-Ruiz.
After the agents left, she led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a private jury door. Agents spotted Flores-Ruiz in the corridor, followed him outside and arrested him after a foot chase. A week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan in the courthouse, leading her outside in handcuffs.
Flores-Ruiz was deported in November.
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