It will edit, so if something pops up
or if you need to drink a 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 gonna take at least a big chunk of this
and air it on here and now as it.
So that's why we've got the two cameras and everything.
That way we get you plenty of time to speak your mind.
Instead of having me speak it for you.
Or edit down to what we think you wanna say.
How are we doing here?
Good to go.
We're on.
All right, well Judge Jimo, 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'll go back to how the Constitution
was written at the time with the intent of the founders
when they wrote it.
That's complicated language.
I'll tell you that my philosophy basically 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
toward the litigants that appear in front of my court.
I respect that they're entitled to their day in court.
That they're entitled to have somebody
that's gonna listen to them all the way
till the end of the case
before I go deciding or making up my mind on things.
So I think that wraps up 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 partisan 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 them, 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 men, 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 overtured
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 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 gonna keep them
from getting sued for their actions,
what's gonna keep them out of trouble
with the police, other things.
So you have to have that stability.
So we should have great respect for precedent.
We should only rarely and only in extraordinary circumstances
be overturning it.
So what do you think about the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
their drop boxes decision or the redistricting decision
and the most recent iteration of the court
overturning those old two cases?
Well, you know, I read the original case
from a little over two years ago now.
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 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 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 ballot.
You can put it in the US mailbox
and that's a secure, safe way to mail in your ballot.
Or you can bring it to your clerk in person.
I think that the majority got it wrong on that one.
So how do you square your 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.
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 returned it.
And it can create a messy situation, I guess,
where each state is gonna have their own set of rules
based upon what the voters in that state want.
Mississippi and California
are gonna have two different,
very different perspectives on abortion.
But that's the way the Constitution intended it.
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'd been a long time
that the road decision was in place.
But the United States 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 a member of the Supreme Court.
Because 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 kind of reset public expectations
for what a Supreme Court race looks like?
I think it's unfortunate, but it did.
It's like inflation, it never goes down.
It always only seems to go up.
And I suspect this race is gonna have even more money spent
than in 2023.
You know, you can only run so many TV ads
before you've made your point.
But this is what you gotta do.
I've gotta be competitive.
The other side's gotta 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 2023, Janet Protece,
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 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 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 you know how this game's gonna 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 does a survival.
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 gonna rule on cases, period.
So there's gonna be people watching this
and they 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 do you explain to them
the difference between running as a partisan
versus running for this?
Well, first off, all of my prior roles
were as a prosecutor in the Waukesha DA's office.
And 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 with my role as a judge.
But I've set those things,
I've set those partisan 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.
Sure to 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 office holders
being on the Supreme Court.
Justice Prosser was there.
He explained to me the difference
between being a judicial conservative
and a political conservative.
Do you agree with his definitions there?
Absolutely.
Being a political conservative
means ascribing to certain policy values.
As a judicial conservative,
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 courts' 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, Janet Protisei,
where it's received millions of dollars
for the Democratic Party in Wisconsin,
she said that she would recuse herself from any cases
that they were a direct plaintiff or involved in.
You were, both candidates in this case,
are going to have partisan support.
Both 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?
Well, it's awfully hard for Justice Protisei
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 a judicial official, at any level,
your responsibility is 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 you 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 you can't come in and how you would rule,
but they are old issues in Act 10 or voter ID.
That's also going to be a constitutional amendment
on the same ballot as your election.
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'd rule on those issues.
And frankly, Act 10 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 10.
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 Quota Savage and Justice Dalek,
were both caught on video promising if elected,
they would strike down Act 10.
And then my opponent represented
the Madison Teachers Association in the lawsuit
to strike down Act 10 and she argued
that it should be found unconstitutional.
Can she be objective when she had a former client
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 gonna tell anybody how I'm gonna 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 Brian Haggard
has become a flashpoint on the court court 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.
Brian Haggardorn, Justice Haggardorn
has voted along with the rest of the conservative majority.
There were some cases that were very high profile
back in 2020 election that he broke
with the conservative majority
and he's caught a lot of grief for that.
Justice Haggardorn was Chief Legal Counsel
for Governor Walker back when I was Attorney General.
The two of us worked together all the time.
I know I'm 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 looking forward to having a chance
to work with Justice Haggardorn on the court.
For that matter, I'm looking forward
to working with my old friend, Justice Jill Karofsky.
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 the interests
of crime victims all over the state.
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 mentioned Haggardorn's old position
as Chief Legal Counsel because that is what
you're referencing your opponent.
Also served as you said, and it was a very partisan role.
How would you view Haggardorn's job
in terms of setting aside his partisan history?
Well, kind of the premise of your question
is that Justice Haggardorn has broken ranks
with conservatives at times.
There you can see that your partisan history
doesn't necessarily define you on the court.
Justice Prosser also, the Assembly Majority Leader,
speaker, reverse that, the Assembly Speaker.
Certainly he was the most powerful Republican
in the state at the time and Justice Prosser,
I don't have anybody that would accuse him
of ever having injected politics or partisanship
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 courting for your support
and they've already come out and 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 a 72-county race.
I have one county left.
I've campaigned 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 people in Wisconsin
to know 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,
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 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 times attorney general
and the rape kits in the history there,
your opponent's 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'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 kits tested.
So when I came to DOJ,
my head of the officer crime victim services,
now Justice Kirofsky also had been a longtime
frontline prosecutor doing the same kind of cases.
We both recognized we had to do better.
For 25 years, those kits had accumulated in storerooms
at police departments and hospitals,
and nobody sent them in.
We recognized we needed to do that,
but we also recognized we couldn't just take 6,000 kits
and dump them on the crime lab.
They have day-to-day responsibilities.
So we had to go forward and secure funding to be able
to pay for getting those kits 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 4,000 kits.
Every single kit that needed to be tested was done
in that four years.
We worked a miracle.
And 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 tell this work.
Check with groups like the Wisconsin Coalition
Against Sexual Assault.
And you can find them.
You can find the articles.
They talked about this in,
back in the time when I was Attorney General
about what a monumental task and accomplishment this was.
Obviously this was a huge issue in 2018.
Is it frustrating that this is going to be
and fodder for your opponents again?
What's frustrating whenever someone's bringing up something
that I consider to be a false or misleading ad?
But frankly, we're ready for it.
And 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 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 once.
That's a profound difference.
And 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 led him 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 you 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 own personal, political views
or interests 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 my opponents team is running
on a particular case where they're saying
I let domestic abusers go free.
And what they're ignoring,
what they don't want the public to know and add
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 the 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 has changed man, he has restored himself
and he worked hard every day since it's incident happened
and 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
and probation to show that he has truly redeemed
and he did it.
He hasn't been in any trouble ever since
and he 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.
Are trans people a 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 our constitutional rights.
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
wanna 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 or gone.
Gender change operation and wanna 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
six people that were prosecuted.
What's your opinion of those pardons?
Presidents have the power to pardon people.
There's some arguments about what that means,
but as to the January six defendants,
anyone who engaged in violence,
anyone who assaulted a police officer
used force to go into the Capitol.
Personally, 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 choose whether to pardon them or not.
When it comes to the public's perception of this race,
a lot of people are gonna tune in.
They're gonna learn through this,
through campaign commercials at the last minute,
through attack ads, negative ads.
Do you think there are people that are gonna vote
for either you or your opponent based on one or two issues
that they hold as a personal thing?
Or is there, 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 where I'm at talking to people,
they want the court to be objective.
They wanna 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 changed
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 a former Supreme Court
Justice, Michael Gableman, he has a disciplinary process
that's running through.
Do you comment on his actions over the last couple of years
and his role in 2020's election?
I don't know anything other than when I read
in newspaper articles about the case.
I don't have any access to any of the complaints
or if there's any briefing in the matter,
I couldn't comment on that.
Besides, when I'm elected onto 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 it's hesitant to reprimand their own.
What goes into that process of deciding if someone else,
especially if 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 an objective application of the law
to those facts and circumstances.
And then you have to look to at what's happened historically
because you can't, 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 gonna 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 Troopis
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 10 years ago,
the term law fair 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 this 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 millions of dollars in civil damages.
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 Shimmel, thanks for your time.
Thank you.
All right, that was good.
We made it.
You're good?
Yeah, I'm good.
All right.
Yesterday this would have been a different story.
I was like, so you wanna get some room tones?
All right, so if we just wanna hang here for a second,
we're gonna get the sound of the silverware.
All right.
Always the most exciting part of the interview.