The Badgering State: Wis. Battles over Worker’s Rights and Skirmishes in the Supreme Court
If you believe Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David T. Prosser Jr., he just wanted to get out a press release. It was June 13, and the justice wanted to announce a decision involving Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial 2011 budget bill eliminating most government employee collective bargaining rights.
What followed was a donnybrook among the justices. Before it was over, Prosser stood accused of putting fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in a choke hold. Bradley was accused of putting her fist in Prosser’s face. And the Dane County Sheriff’s Office was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to investigate.
In a year filled with political volatility, including a hostile public standoff in the state legislature over the labor rights of the state’s public employees, perhaps the worst evidence of dysfunction in the Badger State proved to be allegations of bad tempers and fisticuffs in the state’s highest courts.
Ultimately, a special prosecutor appointed by the chief judge of the Dane County Circuit Court decided not to file charges against Prosser or Bradley. That didn’t stop the county sheriff’s department from publishing its incident reports, making public all seven justices’ accounts of the court’s long-standing tensions.
Prosser and Bradley denied that they meant to hurt each other that Monday evening. But whatever happened, the reports indicate that the fight was sparked not by either’s passion for or against collective bargaining. Rather, it seems that tempers escalated from long-standing disagreements that got personal.
The recent fracas played out over some hard-fought and expensive judicial campaigns, as well as justices facing ethics complaints. Add to that a feisty chief justice whom many lawyers consider testy and arrogant, and a tight election that Prosser won against an unlikely candidate who ran after protests against Walker’s “budget repair bill.”
Politics were already tense in Madison, where thousands of pro-labor demonstrators amassed at the capitol building, protesting Walker’s collective bargaining cuts. The situation got so bad that the state’s 14 Democratic senators fled south to Illinois to prevent a quorum on the legislation.
Click here to read the rest of “The Badgering State” from the February issue of the ABA Journal.
