It's really incumbent to continue to watch what's going on in the Koch Industries Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, now that goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker has gone back to his job as its manager, and now that he continues to turn the state's political culture into a SuperFund site. For example, recently, he installed a crony named Rebecca Bradley in a seat on the state's Supreme Court, and Justice Bradley turns out to be quite the piece of work.

Bradley and Milwaukee attorneys Don Daugherty, David Simon, and Daniel Kelly said in a 2008 opinion column that a pledge put forward by the State Bar of Wisconsin's Judicial Campaign Integrity Committee shouldn't be signed by candidates because it infringes on free speech.

"The Bar should not try to regulate speech by judicial candidates in a way that would be plainly unconstitutional if done by the government," the four wrote. "The far better course is for candidates and their supporters to provide information they believe appropriate — good, bad, even ugly — and let voters decide." The committee was created in 2007 by the bar association's then-president, Tom Basting Sr., as a self-appointed watchdog group that tried to referee that year's race for Wisconsin Supreme Court. The committee was disbanded in 2009, according to the bar association. Basting and his group issued seven statements reacting to advertising in the race that it deemed false or to have impugned the reputation of either candidate or the court.

(Have we mentioned recently that an elected judiciary is the Second Worst Idea In American politics? Let the good people at the Brennan Center tell you why.)

In essence, then, Bradley and her co-authors are arguing for the right of candidates to lie in their advertisements, and to put the ethical obligations of their professions in a jar while they're running for office. It follows, then, that campaigning for political office is a lesser ethical pursuit than, say, the law. Of course, this has become axiomatic in Wisconsin since Walker was thrice elected its governor. But Bradley's apparent contempt for democratic norms has its comic side, too. The state still has a functioning open records law, and Bradley has declined to let it inconvenience her over much. A liberal watchdog group, One Wisconsin Now, filed an open-records request for the office calendars from Bradley's days as a judge in a lower case. Bradley responded by providing the group with a raft of blank pages that indicated she had done no official business in that court for two-and-a-half years. Confronted by this improbability, Bradley admitted…well, I don't want to spoil it.

Responding to an open records request from a liberal group, the newly appointed conservative justice provided monthly calendars that suggested she had no official business—other than the cases she was hearing—for 29 straight months. But in answer to questions from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a court official recently said Bradley actually did not have a way to retrieve her calendars.

Psych! What a scamp Madam Justice Bradley is.

And, of course, the open-records law itself is currently under siege by the forces of Walkerism, probably to mask from the people of Wisconsin how much of their money got chucked down the rathole of Walker's misbegotten presidential campaign.

Now an obscure administration board charged with facilitating the retention of records quietly made significant changes to the open records law without required public notice, giving the Walker administration a new way to deny records requests about the use of public resources during his presidential run and taxpayer handouts to Walker donors. The Freedom of Information Council asked the Dane County District Attorney to prosecute the board for violating the open meetings law when it made the changes. The swift pushback on the changes has prompted the board to reconsider and the board chair announced a public hearing about the changes on Monday, January 11th.

The Augean Stables were a Swiffer commercial compared to the political fumigation that it's going to take to clean up Wisconsin politics when these people are through with the state.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.