Dem voters in two separate suits have asked the state Supreme Court to overturn Wisconsin’s congressional map and put new lines in place for the 2026 election.
The filings come a month after a state Supreme Court race in which conservatives warned Dems would seek to overturn Wisconsin’s congressional map if liberals maintained their 4-3 majority.
Dane County Judge Susan Crawford won the April 1 race by 10 percentage points, securing a liberal majority on the court through at least 2028, and state GOP Chair Brian Schimming said today the suits came as no surprise.
“These politically motivated lawsuits are a desperate attempt by far-left Democrats who have shown time and time again that they can’t win without rigged maps,” he said.
>> WisPolitics is now on the State Affairs network. Get custom keyword notifications, bill tracking and all WisPolitics content. Get the app or access via desktop.
A spokesperson for the state Dem Party declined comment.
The new suits attack the map — which now has a 6-2 GOP majority — on several fronts, including the “least change” standard the former conservative majority on the Supreme Court used for the lines now in place.
With Dem Gov. Tony Evers and GOP lawmakers unable to agree on a map, the state Supreme Court directed the parties before it to address things like population changes while hewing as closely as possible to the existing maps for the Legislature and Congress that Republicans had approved in 2011. Ultimately, the courts chose Evers’ maps for the House seats and the GOP lines for the legislative districts. It ruled the guv’s congressional lines most closely aligned with the “least change” approach the court established as a requirement for the new maps.
But in 2023, a new 4-3 liberal majority ruled the legislative lines put in place a year earlier were unconstitutional because they included municipal islands. The court also threw out the “least change” principle in the process. The new suits argue with that principle disavowed, there is no foundation to justify the current House lines.
The court’s 4-3 liberal majority unanimously rejected a similar request last year to hear a lawsuit challenging the congressional lines. The crux of that petition was the court’s rejection of the “least change” principle in the challenge to the legislative maps. It also argued allowing the lines to remain subjected voters to “intolerable partisan unfairness.” But unlike the new filings, it didn’t raise any challenges under the Wisconsin Constitution.
One of the new suits argues the districts when drawn failed to adhere to standards requiring the districts to have identical populations. That would be six districts with 736,715 people and two with 736,714. But some districts when drawn had 736,716 people. The suit, filed by the Campaign Legal Center, also argues the congressional map improperly split counties.
The other suit involves Dem voters whose legal team includes the firm of Dem attorney Marc Elias, who is well known for his work on election cases.
It argues the lines are a partisan gerrymander that violates protections in the Wisconsin Constitution for equal protection as well as free speech and association. The suit argues it does that by packing Democratic voters in the 2nd and 4th districts — the only two now represented by Dems — while diluting their share of the electorate in several other seats in a way that makes it impossible to elect a representative of their choice.
Both suits ask the state Supreme Court to take original action and hear the cases directly without first requiring them to go through the lower courts.
The Elias suit seeks to cast the 2011 process of drawing new House lines “the quintessential partisan gerrymander.”
But in doing so, the Dem voters glossed over the testimony of a key player in drawing those lines.
Shortly after Republican lawmakers drew new legislative and congressional lines in 2011, a federal lawsuit was filed challenging those maps.
As part of the suit, Andrew Speth, who was chief of staff to then-U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, at the time, was deposed.
The Elias suit notes Speth “took primary responsibility for drafting the new congressional map” and in meetings with GOP members of Wisconsin’s delegation, “the congressmen expressed their desire to draw districts that would maximize the chances for Republicans to be elected.”
Speth also, though, said in his deposition that Ryan told him “we need to be fair and we need to try and be bipartisan and we obviously have to be legal, and so those were the three things that drove the conversations we had with all of the members.”
Speth also noted it was tradition for the members of the delegation to forward a map to the Legislature and Ryan wanted to continue that tradition to avoid the GOP-controlled Legislature taking over and turning it into a partisan fight.
In that January 2012 deposition, Speth discussed how he worked with Erik Olson, who was chief of staff to then-U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, on drawing a map and meeting with members of the delegation to address their concerns.
Those included:
- U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, saying she had an interest in representing the north side of Milwaukee since her district had to grow.
- Then-U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin had concerns about the size of her district to make it easier for the Madison Dem to commute from her home to various parts of the seat to meet with constituents. Then-U.S. Rep. Tom Petri, R-Fond du Lac, expressed similar concerns about commute times.
- Then-GOP U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble wanted to pick up Calumet County if his 8th CD had to grow because he owned property there.
- Then-U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, wanted to ensure the Mississippi River corridor remained part of his district; Speth testified one map he had considered proposed moving the Madison-based 2nd District west to the state line.
Speth also said during the deposition that then-GOP U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy’s primary concern was “related to shoring up the district from a political standpoint” and making it more Republican. He had just won the state’s 7th CD in northern Wisconsin, which Dem Dave Obey had represented for four decades.
Overall, Speth said a driving principle behind the map that was drawn was to be “fair” to both sides, even with Republicans in control of both houses of the Legislature and the guv’s office.
“It’s a process whereby if one side controls the legislative process, they’re basically able to pass maps through the process to their liking, and our thought was we’ve got to work with everyone in this delegation following the drawing of this map and therefore we should do things that are sensible and fair and not do things like draw incumbents together, as happens in other states, and that we shouldn’t do things that show we’re being overly political by flipping districts from being a Democrat district to a Republican district, and basically to take input from the other members rather than just manipulating the process to our own liking,” Speth said.
