Edit So if something pops
up or if you need a drink of water,
feel free.
But the way we're talking is
hopefully we've got about a half
hour to chat to cover a
lot of ground, but we're going to
take at least a big chunk of this
and air it on here and now as
it's. So that's where we got the
cameras and everything.
That way we get you plenty of time
to speak your mind instead
of having me speak it for you.
Great.
Edit down to what we think you want
to say.
How are we doing here? Good to go.
We're on.
All right. Well done, Jamal.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
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 gets 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 too,
towards the litigants and appear in
front of my court.
I respect that they are entitled to
their day in court, that they're
entitled to have somebody that's
going to listen to them all the way
to the end of the case before
I go deciding or making up my mind
on things.
So those are those, I
think, that represent my judicial
philosophy, how I view this.
The Supreme Court in Wisconsin over
the last decade plus has become the
court of last resort, handling a lot
of disputes between the
administrative and the legislative
branches.
How do you separate out partizan
politics and get down to the core of
what the judges should be looking
at?
The same way I do it every day on
the bench.
You know, we ask every jury
that serves when we impanel them,
we swear them in.
And then the first thing that
happens is the judge instructs
and you are not to begin discussing
this case among yourselves or
with anyone, and you're not to begin
deciding the issues of this case
until you've heard all of the
evidence from both sides.
You've heard the arguments of the
lawyers, and I've instructed you on
the law.
That's what works for jurors.
The same thing for judges.
Everyone comes everyone
comes into a courtroom, whether
you're a jury or a judge
with your history.
And I don't have the the men and I
always tell the jurors, I don't have
the men in black pen, that I can
erase your memories.
I don't have that.
So the question for you is, can
you set aside your
history and hear this
case in an unbiased way?
And that's the same thing any judge
has to do.
It's easy to take the politics out
as long as you're willing to make
that commitment.
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 a 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
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.
So what do you think about the
Wisconsin Supreme Court there
Dropbox's decision or
the redistricting decision, the most
recent iteration of the court
overturning those two cases?
Well, you know, I read the original
case from
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 mailbox,
which is essentially a Dropbox.
And the whole argument was that
we're making it too hard for people
who don't work regular jobs
that don't work.
They can't get to the polling place
early to drop off their their
their ballot.
You can put it in a U.S.
mailbox. 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.
So how do you square your approach
to precedent with the DOPs decision?
It's obviously that at the federal
level was a pretty big overturning a
precedent.
Yep, that was a very
old precedent too, and it was
established.
The United States Supreme Court
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 return to.
And it's a it can
create a
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
recognize.
That was a bill that would've been
a long time that that's that the
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.
Let's talk about the race to how to
become the member of the Supreme
Court.
Over the years, more and more money
has come into these elections.
It's not new, but it is getting
drastically more expensive.
Do you think 2023, that race
kind of reset public expectations
for what a Supreme Court race looks
like?
I think it's unfortunate, but it did
not. It's like inflation.
It never goes down.
It always only seems to go up.
And I
suspect this race is.
Is going to have even more money,
spent it in 2023.
You know, you can only run so many
TV ads before you've made your
point.
But this is what you've got to do.
I've got to be competitive.
The other side's got to be
competitive. We're both working
to have the resources we need to get
our message out.
I think I wish we could go back
to a time when people would
read a newspaper article.
Watch a PBS story
to find out about the candidates.
Watch debates.
But all too often, it's
driven by ads and oftentimes
negative ads.
So in 2000, 23, general
policy, which kind of set a new
territory in terms of talking about
personal values, 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
districting maps.
That wasn't talking about a personal
value that was stating, that
was stating a legal opinion, her
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 bought your
$17 beer,
but you sat down and the umpire
comes out not in the black you're
supposed to wear, but a Cardinals
jersey.
You're not buying another beer
because this you know, this game's
going to happen.
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.
You know, 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
that 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 office?
Well, first of all, my prior
roles were as a prosecutor
in Waukesha DA's office.
And I did I was a D.A.
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 as I've
set those partizan things aside
every single day on the bench.
It's worth noting my opponent also
has a partizan history.
She was chief legal counsel
for Governor Jim Doyle.
It doesn't get any more partizan
than being in that role.
Short of being the governor, you're
the next most partizan person in
that office.
Both of us have partizan histories,
and it's 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
Partizan 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. Right.
Do you agree with his definitions
there?
Absolutely.
Being a political conservative means
ascribing to certain policy
values as
a judicial conservative.
It is. And it's a philosophy like
you asked me about earlier.
Any 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 liberal.
So general policy, which
received millions of dollars, the
Democratic Party, Wisconsin, she
said that she would recuse herself
from any cases that they were direct
plaintiff or involved in.
You were.
Both candidates in this case are
going to have Partizan support.
Both of the parties are heavily
involved. The races are too
important for the parties to step
aside and be not part of it.
That's the reality of the ground
game. How will you approach recusal
when it comes to those who have
supported you, donated to you,
endorsed you?
Well, it's awfully hard for just as
protasevich to say
she'll recuse on anything that the
Democratic Party's involved in.
But then she stayed on the
legislative redistricting maps and
she came. Well, they're not directly
a party.
Come on. They were the clear
beneficiary of that decision.
I think she was putting form over
substance very much there.
But for it for
a judicial official, at
any level, your responsibility
is if if you have a personal
stake, you or some family member
has a personal stake in the outcome
of this case, you must recuse.
That's unethical not to do so.
Otherwise, just like a juror, when
they're asked questions in the jury
box can use to find out whether they
can be on this case and be fair and
impartial, the judge needs to
search their soul and determine,
can you decide this case
without having any political
baggage, without having your
personal history or biases interfere
with your ability to be fair and
impartial?
If you cannot do that, then
you should recuse.
So there are a couple of big issues
that are going to be coming before
the court in the future, most likely
that I know you can't comment on how
you would rule, but they are all
issues in Act ten or
voter I.D.
That's also going to be a constitutional
amendment on the same ballot as your
election. Right.
So how do you approach being able to
talk about those issues when you
have defended those laws
in the past?
Well, at the same time, possibly
being sitting on
the bench regarding those issues in
the future?
Well, I don't talk about how I rule
on those issues.
And frankly,
Act ten was resolved in the US
Supreme Court and the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals.
Even before I was attorney general,
I was still in the DA's office when
those issues were decided by those
courts.
So I've never had any direct role
in anything involving Act ten.
What I do ask voters is
to ask themselves whether they think
that if my opponent
wins, can this court truly be
objective? When two justices
sitting on the court, both Justice
Protasevich and Justice Dallen
were both caught on video promising
if elected, they would strike down
Act.
And then my opponent represented the
Madison Teachers Association
in the lawsuit to strike down Act
ten. And she argued that it should
be found unconstitutional.
Can she be objective when she had a
former client that
that had her do that work for her?
And can those other two be objective
based on those promises?
I can ask those questions.
I'm not going to tell anybody how
I'm going to rule because like I do
in every case, I will
read the briefs, I will assess
the facts, I will look at the
relevant law, I'll read all the
cases, and then I'll assess what
the right answer is based on the
law.
So in recent years, Justice Ryan
Hagedorn has become a flashpoint on
the court for conservatives.
He was actually an issue in the
primary in the last election.
What is your opinion of how he's
ruled from the bench and the place
he has on the court?
You know, what's gotten lost
in all this is well over 90%
of the time.
Ryan Hagedorn.
Justice Hagedorn has voted along
with the rest of the conservative
majority.
There were some cases that were very
high profile back in the 2020
election that he broke
with with the conservative majority.
And he's he's caught a lot of grief
for that.
Justice Hagedorn was
chief legal counsel for Governor
Walker back when I was attorney
general.
The two of us worked together all
the time.
I know him on a personal level,
and we were able to
work collaboratively and
cooperatively to get good things
done to make sure the state of
Wisconsin had good representation
in the courts.
I'm I'm looking forward to having
a chance to work with Justice
Hagedorn on the court, for that
matter. I'm looking forward to
working with my old friend, Justice
Jill Carroll.
She was she was my director
of the Office of Crime Victim
Services, my executive team
at the Department of Justice.
And she did amazing work
representing representing the
interests of crime victims all over
the state.
No one no one could have
done a better job than she did
there. And I'm looking forward to
reuniting and working with her.
It's interesting you mention
Hagedorn's old position as chief
legal counsel because that is what
you're referencing. Your opponent,
right, also served, as you said, it
was a very partizan role.
How would you view Hagedorn's job
in terms of setting aside his
Partizan history?
Well, kind of the premise of your
question is that Justice Hagedorn
has broken ranks with conservatives
at times.
There you can see that your
partizan history doesn't
doesn't necessarily define you on
the court.
Justice Prosser Also
the the Assembly
majority Assembly, Majority leader.
Speaker Speaker reversed that.
The Assembly Speaker.
Certainly he was the most powerful
Republican in the state at the time.
And Justice Prosser,
I don't I don't know of anybody that
would accuse him of ever having
injected politics or partizanship
into his into his rulings.
Clearly, if you are a person of
integrity, you can set those things
aside.
So when it comes to the campaign,
how do you keep the momentum
from Republican victories
last November?
But that's a lot of the same group
that you're you're courting for your
support. They've already come out,
endorsed you.
How do you get them to carry over
that momentum of door knocking and
fundraising, doing all the things
that are necessary to win an
election here.
By being there?
I've run I've I've run a 72
county race.
I have one county left that campaign
in 71 counties.
I've been to most counties many
times over the course of almost
14 months that I've been campaigning
for this because I
want to I want people in Wisconsin
and all that. I'm here to represent
all of you, not just people
in Waukesha County or not just
people in Madison, but people in
Taylor County and Marinette County
and Kenosha County.
I'm continuing to go
places every single day.
I have a packed schedule where I'm
out meeting with voters, talking
about the importance of this race.
And I'm finding that people are
plugged in. They haven't lost they
haven't lost an ounce of the
momentum from November.
So one of the issues that's already
become a topic in this election has
to do with your time as attorney
general and the rape kits and the
history there of your opponents
attacking on you.
You've already got ads out defending
your position on that.
So explain your
position on that and I guess set the
record straight from your perspective.
I I'm proud of the work,
what we accomplished for survivors
of sexual violence.
I came from the DA's office.
I spent over a decade prosecuting
sensitive crimes cases.
I recognized the value
in getting those kids tested.
So when I came to DOJ, my
head of the Office of Crime Victim
Services, now Justice Cross,
also had been a long time
front line prosecutor during the
same kind of cases.
We both recognize we had to
do better.
For 25 years, those kids
had accumulated in storerooms and
police departments and hospitals
and nobody sent them in.
We recognize we need to do that, but
we also recognize we couldn't just
take 6000 kits and dump
them on the crime lab.
They have day to day
responsibilities.
So we had to go forward and seek.
Your funding to be able
to pay for getting those kids
tested.
We also needed to find out where
they were. There was no inventory,
so we needed to go to law
enforcement all around the state
and have them check their inventory
rooms, go to the hospitals, check
their inventory rooms.
We got that all together and then we
had to start going through and
finding all those survivors because
this is evidence collected from
their body, even inside their
body.
You cannot just go use that however
you want without talking to them
about it. So we did.
We found those survivors.
We talked to them. We got their
consent to test those kits.
And before my term of office
as attorney general, we tested
over 4000 kits.
Every single kit that needed to be
tested was done.
In that four years, we worked
a miracle.
And it's a it's a scam to
suggest to voters that this was
anything other than that.
Check with your local law
enforcement.
Check with the sheriffs who come
forward to to tell this work.
Check with groups like the Wisconsin
Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
And you can find or you can find the
articles. They they talked about
this in back in the
time when I was attorney general.
But what a monumental task, an
accomplishment this was.
Obviously, this was a huge issue in
2018.
Is it frustrating that this is
going to be fodder for your
opponents again?
What's frustrating, whenever someone
is bringing up something that I
consider to be a false or misleading
ad, but frankly,
we're ready for it.
And we've got we've got sheriffs
that have come forward to talk about
this very issue.
We've got advocates that are coming
forward to talk about this very
issue.
And it's a great chance for me to
highlight the difference between
myself and my opponent, where
I, I served 25
years standing in the courtroom
with crime victims and arguing
for justice on their behalf.
I spent 25 years going to the
crime scene, helping law enforcement
get this case solved and take it all
the way to conviction
for 25 years.
My opponent never did any of that,
not not once.
That's a profound difference in
this. This bringing this up is a
great opportunity because they
would use these survivors of
sexual violence and their concerns
and justice for them as a political
weapon. It's a great opportunity for
me to talk about how wrong that is
and to highlight my experience.
One of the most common ads we see in
these kind of elections has to do
with when, as a former judge,
someone was lenient on
an offender or let them
out of prison.
Do you ever think of that from the
bench? Is there ever because you've
been running, preparing for this
race for a while?
How do you avoid that separation of.
Well, if I'm too lenient here, this
will turn up in a campaign
commercial?
Well, from the time I decided to run
for Supreme Court, I've been in the
civil division, so I haven't handled
any criminal cases.
But no,
you can't do this.
You can't put your your own
personal political views
or interests in
in place of doing justice.
I've done the right thing from the
best of my judgment.
I've looked at cases honestly, I've
worked hard and I've done what I
believe to be the right thing.
You know, there's an ad right now
that that my opponent's
team is running
on a particular case where they're
saying, I let domestic abusers
go free.
And what they're ignoring, what
they're what they don't want the
public to know in that ad is that
this was a United States
veteran who served in combat,
who came back and was struggling
with PTSD and bipolar disorder
and substance abuse disorder,
who by the time we got to sentencing
had turned things around, was And
when the victim came and spoke at
the sentencing hearing, she begged
me, Judge, don't lock him up.
He is a changed man.
He has restored himself and he
worked hard every day since this
incident happened in our family
is stronger because of this.
Any judge in their right mind would
have done the same thing I did that
day and give him a chance on
probation to show
that he is truly redeemed.
And he did it.
He hasn't been in any trouble ever
since and never was in trouble
before.
One of the other issues that
has popped up in the legal community
has to do with trans rights
and the laws that are
being drafted or implemented.
Our trans people are protected
class. Do they have any special
privileges or rights when it comes
to that?
Under the law, they're not in a
particular protected class.
No.
But in a courtroom,
in the justice system,
you don't have to be in a protected
class to enjoy,
to enjoy our constitutional rights.
You know, I do name changes.
Every Monday morning is when we hold
name change hearings.
And I have
it's routine that I have individuals
who have transitioned or
are transitioning, want to change
their names.
I respect them for that decision and
I make those name changes as a
matter of routine. I've even had
some cases where they've
gone. On gender
change operation and want to change
their birth certificate.
The law provides that they can do
that. That's what the law provides.
My personal opinions have nothing to
do with that.
If they meet the standards under the
law, they deserve the respect
of the court and they deserve to
have their rights granted to them.
Switching to a federal perspective,
Donald Trump recently pardoned all
of the January 6th people
that were prosecuted.
What's your opinion of those
pardons?
I you know, presidents have
have the power to pardon people.
There's some arguments about what
that means. But as
of the January 6th defendants,
anyone who engaged in violence,
anyone who assaulted a police
officer used force to go into the
Capitol.
I'm personally
I have I have some dispute with them
being granted a pardon in those
circumstances.
I don't know the individual facts of
every case. And the arguments
I hear is that many of them
did not engage in violence that day.
That's the president's prerogative
to to choose whether to pardon them
or not.
When it comes to the public's
perception of this race.
A lot of people are going to tune
in. They're going to learn through
this through campaign commercials at
the last minute, through attack ads,
negative ads.
Do you think there are people that
are going to vote for either you or
your opponent based on 1 or 2 issues
that they hold as a personal thing?
Or is there do you think there are
people voting on this in terms of
what's best for the Supreme Court?
What I'm hearing when I'm talking to
voters, whether I'm at a dairy
breakfast and back in June,
I went to dozens of
them or county fairs
or you name it, a Patriot group
or wherever where I live, I'm out
talking to people.
They want the court to be objective.
They want to restore this sense of
independence, this sense
of integrity and objectivity on the
court.
That's what they're most interested
in. Yes, I'm sure people have
personal and personal
issues that matter to them.
But I've tried hard to convince
people. You need to set that aside.
If you want something in the law
change based on your personal
interests, you need to go to the
legislature to change that.
The court needs to enforce the law
the way the legislature wrote it.
One final question having to do with
former Supreme Court Justice Michael
Gable.
He has a disciplinary process that's
running through. Can you comment on
his actions over the last couple
of years and his role in the 2020
election?
I don't I don't know.
I don't know anything other than
what I read in newspaper articles
about the case. I don't have any
access to any of the any
of the complaints or the if there's
any briefing in the matter, I, I
couldn't comment on that.
And besides, I
think when I am elected on to the
Supreme Court, this may rise
to the level of the Supreme Court
reviewing it. So it would be
absolutely improper for me to start
forming opinions on that.
Now.
You mentioned before the Judicial
Ethics Commission sometimes is
hesitant to reprimand their own.
What goes into that process of
deciding if someone else, especially
someone in so high profile, actually
actually done something worthy of
disbarment?
What should go into the process
is an objective analysis of the
facts and allegations
and then and an objective
application of the law to those
facts and circumstances.
And then you have to look to
what's happened historically,
because you can't if
you in one case, you give this
way out of bounds kind of reaction,
either one way or the other.
Compared to what's normally happened
in that kind of allegation, well,
then it's going to look very
political. So you should try
to stay consistent with what's been
the typical kind of reaction
from the Ethics commission
over that.
Do you have an opinion on Jim
Troopers and the charges against
him?
Only my personal opinions.
Those are things that might end up
in front of the court.
I'll say this. I am concerned
that ten years ago
the term lawfare wasn't part of our
lexicon in America,
but it is now.
We talk about that.
We use that term all the time
to talk about things that have gone
on. I'm very troubled by
the seeming,
this desire on the part of
some to use the criminal
and civil justice system as a way to
either silence their
political adversaries or
get locked up
or get them held accountable
for, you know, millions
of dollars in
in civil damages.
I'm I'm very concerned that
the justice system is being abused.
And I think that the courts need to
start examining
to what degree they're being used
by people for political purposes.
Judge Jim, thanks for your time.
Thank you.
All right. That was good.
You made it feel good.
Yeah, I'm good.
All right.
Yesterday's would have been a
different story.
I was like.
So you want to get some room tone?
All right. So if we just want to
hang here for a second, we're going
to get the sound of the right
silverware.
Always the most exciting part of the
interview.