>> We are less than 60 days away from the election that will
determine the balance of power on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
We plan on bringing you continuous coverage of this
important race between now and the election on April 1st.
Tonight, we'll introduce you to the conservative in this race,
Brad Schimel. Schimel is currently a Waukesha County
Circuit Court judge, but has previously served as the
Wisconsin Attorney General. And before that, he was the Waukesha
County District Attorney. Here and now, senior political
reporter Zach Schultz sat down with Brad Schimel at a diner in
Waukesha. >> Let's start with your
judicial philosophy. Can you explain how you approach things
from the bench? You know. >> Officially in the legal
world, we say that a person with my philosophy is an originalist,
meaning you go, you go back to how the Constitution was written
at the time with the intent of the founders when they wrote it.
That's that's complicated language. I'll tell you that. My
philosophy basically is, is that I approach my role as a judge
with great humility. I respect the separation of powers that
the legislature sets the laws, not the judge. I approach it
with humility, 2 toward the litigants that appear in front
of my court. I respect that they are entitled to their day in
court, that they are entitled to have somebody that's going to
listen to them all the way till the end of the case. Before I go
deciding or making up my mind on things. So those are those I
think that wraps up my judicial philosophy, how I view this.
>> So how do you approach something like precedent?
Because obviously in federal and state cases, we've seen a lot of
precedents being overturned in recent years.
>> Well, as the circuit court judge, I respect precedent. I
don't have the authority to decide. The Supreme Court got it
wrong on a case. As a Supreme Court justice, we have to we
have to overturn precedent only very rarely and very carefully.
The whole system relies on on stability that people need to be
able to predict what the law says so that lawyers can advise
their clients. So everyday citizens can know what's going
to keep them from getting sued for their actions, what's going
to keep them out of trouble with with the police, other things.
So you have to have that stability. So we should have
great respect for precedent. We should we should only rarely and
only in extraordinary circumstances be overturning it.
>> So what do you think about the Wisconsin Supreme Court with
their drop boxes decision or the redistricting decision and the
most recent iteration of the court overturning those old
cases? original case from a little over
two years ago now. I read I read the decision in this case. I did
look at some of the briefing as well. I would have sided with
the dissent in the recent decision. I, I think they got it
right that the legislature created two ways to vote early
absentee. One is put it in the US mail box, which is
essentially a drop box. You know, the whole argument was
that we're making it too hard for people who don't work
regular jobs that don't work, that can't get to the polling
place early to drop off their, their, their ballot. You can put
it in a US mail box. And that's a secure, safe way to mail to
mail in your ballot. Or you can bring it to your clerk in
person. I think I think that the majority got it wrong on that
one. approach to precedent with the
Dobbs decision? So obviously that at the federal level was a
pretty big overturning of precedent?
>> Yep. That was a very old precedent, too. And it was
established the United States Supreme Court is the recognized
that abortion isn't in the United States Constitution.
There's no reference to it anywhere. Therefore, the
decision belongs with the people, and that's where they
returned it. And it's a it can create a messy situation, I
guess, where each state is going to have their own set of rules
based upon what the voters in that state want. Mississippi and
California are going to have two different, very different
perspectives on abortion. But that's the way the Constitution
intended it. If it's not in the US Constitution, it belongs to
the people and the states, and that's what they recognized.
That was a, you know, it had been a long time that that that
the Roe decision was in place. But the supreme state Supreme
court three years ago, almost now considered that precedent
and decided it was no longer it wasn't valid.
>> So in 2023, Janet Protasiewicz kind of set a new
territory in terms of talking about personal values and saying
those were separate from how she intended to rule or how she
would rule in a case. Did that reset the public expectations
again, for what it should sound like to hear someone running for
the Supreme Court? >> I think when she said the
maps are rigged, referring to the legislative redistricting
maps that wasn't talking about a personal value, that was
stating, that was stating a legal opinion and a judgment.
But, well, the Judicial Ethics Commission looked at it and said
nothing offensive about it. And I guess we have to live with
that. It's worth noting that decisions by the Judicial Ethics
Commission are driven by the majority on the Wisconsin
Supreme Court. That means the majority on the Wisconsin
Supreme Court would have wanted to punish one of their own, and
they just didn't want to. But this isn't acceptable. Imagine
this if you went to a Brewer game and you you bought your $17
beer, but you sat down and the umpire comes out, not in the
Black they're supposed to wear, but a Cardinals jersey. You're
not buying another beer because this you know how this game is
going to end. The Cardinals fan in the stands might feel good
about that. For the moment, but what they're just witnessing is
the death of baseball, right. And now you can always, with
baseball, move on to another sport. If we've got people on
the Supreme Court that can't set their personal opinions aside
and are wearing the jersey of a team, then our justice system
doesn't survive and we don't have any other sport to go to,
so to speak. It's not acceptable and just judges and candidates
for office shouldn't be talking about how they're going to rule
on cases, period. >> So there's going to be people
watching this are going to say, well, you're a former
Republican. You were the attorney general of Wisconsin.
As a Republican. You've run statewide. How is that
different? How how do you explain to them the difference
between running as a partizan versus running for this?
>> Well, first off, all of my prior roles were as a prosecutor
and the Waukesha DA's office, and I did I was a Da as a
Republican in Waukesha County for that and attorney general as
a Republican. Both of those roles, you don't make law. You
enforce the law the way someone else made it or wrote it. And
the same thing in my role as a judge. But I've set those
things. I've set those partizan things aside every single day on
the bench. It's worth noting my opponent also has a partisan
history. She was chief legal counsel for Governor Jim Doyle.
It doesn't get any more partisan than being in that role. Short
of being the governor, you're the next most partisan person in
that office. Both of us have partisan histories, and it's
kind of fraudulent to suggest that just because I officially
ran as a Republican, I'm the only one with that kind of a
history. >> So there is a history of
former partisan officeholders being on the Supreme Court.
Justice Prosser was there. He explained to me the difference
between being a judicial conservative and a political
conservative can. Do you agree with his definitions? There.
>> Absolutely. Being a political conservative means ascribing to
certain policy values as a judicial conservative. It is a
it's a philosophy like you asked me about earlier and a judicial
conservative believes that the courts should be restrained when
they're looking at a law. You interpret it the way the
legislature wrote it, and you don't try to change it into some
other form. The opposite is judicial activism or being a
judicial liberal, where they believe that the court's role is
to is to change the law into a form that they think is best.
And that's the difference between between those judicial,
conservative and judicial liberal, but very different than
the political conservative and the political conservative and