Writers at low production value and pretty tinfoil-y right wing website Wisconsin Right Now have cranked out a fairly panicked play-by-play of Thursday’s Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting, their apprehension in the headline “GOP Commissioners Say 3 Democrats on WEC Could Block Trump Ballot Access” seemingly backed up by actual quotes from the minutes of the meeting.
The WEC is, as many of you are aware, a deeply dysfunctional panel made up of three Democrats and three Republicans held together by legal duct tape, slapped together by Republicans in 2015 to replace another board that was also slapped together by Republicans in the late 1990s after they stripped the Secretary of State’s office of all election administration duties in the 1970s. And yes, Republicans now want to disband the WEC and slap something else together. Anyway there’s a whole other shitshow going on right now with the WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe who the GOP claims is no longer legally serving in the office and fuck how much more background do this need?
Oh and there’s one more, bigger, shitshow with state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz where she might be impeached for who knows the Republicans will find a reason, which automatically suspends her from the job, almost certainly indefinitely because the state Senate will never hold a trial so she can be acquitted and get back to work. She would probably have to resign and then Dem Governor Tony Evers will appoint a Dem replacement setting up a special election next year and it’ll just continue escalating but Republicans don’t give a fuck. This tangent was unfortunately necessary because any challenge to disgraced former President Trump’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in the very swingiest of swing states on the 2024 map will end up at the state Supreme Court, perhaps even ending there and not heading to the US Supreme Court.
Anyway back to this WEC meeting. As Wisconsin Right Now explains, the commissioners voted 5 to 1 to create an emergency rule to establish procedures for ballot access challenges, including of presidential candidates. You may recall Kanye West and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins getting booted off the ballot in 2020 for fucking up their paperwork and ask why the panel would need new rules on how to handle eligibility in 2024 if they were able to make those calls in 2020.
It’s because those were about actual technical paper work issues and the Commission has no procedure in place for handling 14th Amendment challenges. This was specifically about Trump. They seemed very clear about it, with notorious piece of shit Republican commissioner Bob Spindell, famous for his support of Howie Hawkins and Kanye West – not to mention serving as one of the 10 fake Trump 2020 electors, said it plainly “I can not think of anything less American…this is something that goes along the lines of third world countries… This is a terrible thing. It should be killed right now. There is no need for it… All of a sudden, it came out of nowhere with all this stuff on TV and everything else about trying to knock Trump off the ballot. We haven’t had this for a hundred years,” before he conceded “I think it takes four votes to get someone actually on the ballot.”
Meaning there’s a non-zero chance that the Commission could simply block Trump from appearing on the ballot if a challenge lands in front of them, kicking it to the courts. The Wisconsin state Constitution doesn’t have any language in it on eligibility for office with respect to matters such as “rebellion” or “insurrection,” meaning it would be up to federal courts ultimately if the challenge is predicated on Section III of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
However it’s Article XIII of the state constitution where things get interesting, emphasis added:
(2) No person convicted of a felony, in any court within the United States, no person convicted in federal court of a crime designated, at the time of commission, under federal law as a misdemeanor involving a violation of public trust and no person convicted, in a court of a state, of a crime designated, at the time of commission, under the law of the state as a misdemeanor involving a violation of public trust shall be eligible to any office of trust, profit or honor in this state unless pardoned of the conviction.
We’re not legal scholars. We don’t know if that encompasses the presidency. Probably not given the “in this state,” but it’s not a loser’s bet that we’ll going to find out sometime in the next year. If the state Supreme Court does say yes then a challenge to a convicted felon Trump’s eligibility for the ballot based not on the 14th Amendment but Article XIII of the state constitution just might kind of not within the US Supreme Court’s jurisdiction since it’s a matter of the state constitution.
No need to go all Cook Political Report here on what it means for the 2024 election if Trump is blocked from the ballot by a 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. It might however stir your imagination to read this letter to the editor of Talking Points Memo.
It’s a little dark, not going to lie. Might not be very exaggerated either.