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A flurry of Wisconsin Supreme Court opinions were released this week and an order to hear
a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin asking the court to rule that access
to abortion is protected by the state constitution.
The court also decided to take up the appeal to a Dane County judge's ruling that declared
Wisconsin does not have an abortion statute, only one that outlaws attacking a woman in
an attempt to kill her unborn baby.
Senior political reporter Zach Schultz joins us from the Capitol with Lauren Heisach.
Hello Fred.
What liberal justices in the majority, how fast-tracked and foregone are these abortion
cases expected to be?
Well we've already heard from the conservatives through their dissents to taking these cases
that they fully expect the majority on this court to decide in favor of abortion rights
and strike down this 1849 law and perhaps even go as far as to enshrine the right to
abortion in the Wisconsin constitution.
So I think everyone expects that to be the end result in this process.
It would actually be quite surprising to conservatives and a lot of the liberals that supported Janet
Protisei, which in her run for the court just last year, if they didn't go that route.
So how soon could a decision in these cases come?
Well we've got a briefing scheduled right now, 40 days than 20 days for responses.
That puts us into the fall so you can expect oral arguments to be scheduled sometime in
either September or early October.
That puts us on track for a decision either by definitely before the end of the year but
possibly even around the election, depending on where this lands, this could come right
before November.
Reading the writings in this order, the vitriol in this court persists.
Absolutely.
The dissents are acting as press releases for both sides.
The concurrence is on the dissents, they're responding to each other in the footnotes.
This isn't new but it's become more outspoken.
Justices don't do a lot of interviews.
They don't really come on our program that often unless they're running for re-election,
as you know Fred, and they don't sit for a lot of interviews but this is their way of
promoting their views to their specific audiences and we know the courts become politicized
and there are political audiences wanting to hear that opponents and those in favor
of these decisions.
So before decisions and in these cases, there are decisions into other big cases.
Some involving the legality of absentee ballot drop boxes.
That's right.
This is revisiting the Teigen case that outlawed ballot drop boxes that came a couple years
ago.
In that case, that was when the conservatives controlled the court.
It was a very fractured decision.
Justice Hagadorn made the deciding vote and he only concurred with a handful of paragraphs.
Basically only enough to say ballot drop boxes are not specifically allowed by law and therefore
are not allowed under the Constitution.
Now the liberals on the court decided to retake that case under a few new angles and
it's also again from the conservatives in their dissent saying we fully expect the liberals
to approve ballot drop boxes.
But no matter what, there will be some certainty as this case comes out and the decision is
rendered for clerks to know what to expect from August through November so people know
whether they can put their ballots in the mail or to drop box and how to vote this fall.
And then there was the case over separation of powers where legislative committee veto
shut down the governor's stewardship land purchases.
That's right.
Governor Evers sued over a number of different things that the Joint Finance Committee has
held up.
These were appropriations spending that were approved in a bill that were signed into law
by the governor fully approved but then the funding could only be released at a later
date by the Joint Finance Committee and it was held up by Republicans in a number of
different cases.
Now the governor sued and the Supreme Court is only taking this on stewardship which is
land purchases that are designed to be for the benefit of all for public property, for
outdoor natural resources, hunting, skiing, fishing, etc.
They're going to rule on those specific cases but it could have much broader ramifications
because right now we've got battles going on over PFAS funding being held up under joint
finance in the same manner.
We've got funding for the hospitals up in northwest Wisconsin being held up so depending
on how broad that ruling is it could impact a lot of other areas besides stewardship.
So is that the reason that they could kind of just choose stewardship specifically because
potentially the implications are much broader?
Well, it just depends.
Courts in the past will take a very narrow approach to some things and rule only on the
one issue before them or they've seen other times where they take one narrow issue and
then they broaden it out and it applies to a lot of other places.
We'll just have to see how broad this is and we may not know until court rulings down
the road.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
We'll be following these, of course.
It's actual.
Thank you.