Republican Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Monday did not answer an AP reporter’s question on whether impeaching liberal state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz for declining to recuse from a case that threatens to wipe out the extreme gerrymanders that have long kept Vos’s majority safe from the collective will of the voters, with Vos saying only that “Justice Protasiewicz should have recused herself. We think the United States Supreme Court precedent compels her recusal, and the United States Supreme Court will have the last word here.”
On Tuesday morning the AP reported that David Prosser, a Republican former justice appointed to a panel Vos had stood up to try to find a pretext for impeaching Protasiewicz had emailed Vos on Friday to tell him that he was recommending against it, writing “Impeachment is so serious, severe, and rare that it should not be considered unless the subject has committed a crime, or the subject has committed indisputable ‘corrupt conduct’ while ‘in office’… In my view, ‘corrupt conduct’ is not a term that is open to a mere political grievance. If that were the case, legislative bodies could be trading questionable impeachments with considerable frequency.” The email apparently came just before Protasiewicz announced she was not recusing from the case. What’s not clear is why Vos didn’t wait on the other two to overrule Prosser or something before Vos bitched out.