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Incumbent Justice Louis Butler of Milwaukee has been targeted by conservative groups. Burnett County Circuit Court Judge Michael Gableman has been under fire from liberal groups.
The candidates themselves are expected to raise and spend a few hundred thousand dollars in the race.
But if the spring 2007 Supreme Court race is any indication, interest groups will spend millions.
“I think the candidates will largely be bystanders in this race,” said Mike McCabe of the reform group Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “... The candidates will be defined by a handful of interest groups, and they won’t be able to do anything about it.”
In last year’s race between Washington County Circuit Judge Annette Ziegler and Madison lawyer Linda Clifford, the candidates spent about $2.7 million, with Ziegler providing more than $1 million of her own money and Clifford contributing about $500,000 to her own campaign.
Special interest groups spent an estimated $3.1 million on that race, which Ziegler won.
The amounts of money spent by the interest groups are estimates because the law does not require outside groups to report their expenditures, as it does for candidates.
Technically, the ads run by the interest groups are regarded as “issue ads,” even though most would regard them as supporting a candidate.
McCabe and his organization refer to them as “phony issue ads,” because they stop just short of telling people how to vote, even though it is clear which candidate is being supported.
What will happen in this year’s campaign?
“Neither Gableman nor Butler appear to have the willingness or the means to put large amounts of money into their own campaigns,” McCabe said.
If that’s the case, then the impact of the interest groups could be even greater than in 2007 — assuming they spend as much as they did then.
In this year’s race, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce sent a thick packet of information to newspapers — including lengthy articles criticizing the “liberal activist” majority on the state Supreme Court by Federal Judge Diane Sykes, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, and Marquette University law professor Rick Esenberg.
Both candidates have expressed frustration about the third-party ads.
“I’ve said they should take their interest elsewhere,” Gableman said. But he can’t talk to the groups directly because that could constitute “coordination” between the campaign and the groups, which is illegal.
Butler said “judicial activism” is a pejorative term that often doesn’t accurately reflect the facts.
The television ads often will discuss complicated issues in 30 seconds. “How do you talk about a case that takes you 83 pages to write?” Butler said.
Critics argue the court’s majority, which includes Butler, has unduly expanded the rights of defendants to have physical evidence withheld if police do not read them their rights. They also object to the expansion of corporate liability in a case involving a child who got lead poisoning from house paint.
While McCabe believes third-party groups should have the same limits that candidates now live by, Esenberg and other conservatives argue the limits on candidates should be lifted.
“The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign says we need more regulation of speech,” Esenberg said. “My view is that the best solution to speech we don’t like is more speech.”
The special-interest ads aren’t the only controversy in the race. Gableman’s campaign March 14 unveiled its first ad, which attempts to portray Butler as soft on crime and criticizes him for getting a new trial for a criminal defendant — without saying Butler was representing the defendant on appeal as a public defender. Butler’s campaign called it “dishonest, disturbing and despicable,” and others — including some conservatives — also criticized the ad.
Meanwhile, the interest group ads have mainly dealt with criminal law — even though the job of a Supreme Court justice is to review lower court rulings, not put the bad guys away.
McCabe contends the ads not only distort the role of the Supreme Court, they mask the agendas of the interest groups themselves.
For example, the biggest issue for WMC is corporate liability. Yet its latest ad touts Gableman’s “crime-fighting” record. Instead of urging voters to elect Gableman, the “issue ad” tells voters to call the judge to tell him “tough judges keep us safe.”
McCabe said both the anti-Butler and anti-Gableman ads have been misleading “and sometimes downright untruthful advertising.”
About the candidates
LOUIS BUTLER
MICHAEL GABLEMAN
