Ari Berman has been to Wisconsin so many times that he “can attest to the quality of the cheese curds at this point.” Berman reports for Mother Jones. He’s an expert in voting rights, and he is not just in Wisconsin for the cheese curds. He’s there because he calls it a “laboratory for dismantling democracy.” And he wants to peek inside.

What he sees is not pretty, at least not for Democrats. Despite the fact that Wisconsin is a swing state, the GOP has cemented control over the statehouse. They’ve done that using aggressively gerrymandered maps. Just one example: In 2018, even though Dems secured 54 percent of the vote statewide, that translated to a measly third of the seats in the state assembly.

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“The only way to explain the gap between the huge Republican majorities in the Legislature and the fact that Wisconsin is voting for Democrats in all these statewide elections is gerrymandering,” Berman said. “In the elections that Republicans can’t gerrymander, they’re losing. But in the elections that they can gerrymander, they’re winning over and over and over again, not because their policies are popular—because if you look at the polling, what they’re doing is actually incredibly unpopular. It’s because they have rigged the maps to such an extent that they basically can’t lose.”

But earlier this year, Democrats got a chance to flip the narrative. A state Supreme Court seat came up for grabs. And a candidate named Janet Protasiewicz entered the race. Because of this court’s history of ruling on everything from reproductive rights to voting rights, many called this election one of the most important of 2023.

Technically, it was nonpartisan, but everyone knew where Janet Protasiewicz stood. She called the Republican political maps “rigged.” She talked about the right to abortion. And Janet Protasiewicz? She won. But the Legislature is still controlled by Republicans. And Berman says, “They’re not just going to sit back and let Democrats and progressives take away all of the things that they did.”

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On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, we talked with Berman about how much Wisconsin Republicans want to stay in power. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Mary Harris: You’ve said Wisconsin used to be held up as this example of good governance. Can you take me back to that time? When was this?

Ari Berman: Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Wisconsin was lauded for this progressive reform streak. It had this governor named Bob LaFollette, who was nicknamed “Fighting Bob,” and he would crusade against the influence of the robber barons and the stranglehold of money in politics. And Wisconsin was a place that gave birth to policies like Social Security and unemployment insurance and collective bargaining rights for unions.

When did that change?

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It’s swung between red and blue. It hasn’t always been a Democratic state. This was also the place that was home to Joe McCarthy, the fiercely anti-communist senator for many years. But in general, these progressive ideas that it should be a place of good governance lasted for a very long time. The breaking point was in 2011, when Scott Walker was elected governor, and Republicans gained majorities in the Legislature that they then entrenched through gerrymandering. And instead of making Wisconsin a model for progressive reform, they wanted to make it a model for a new brand of hard-edged conservatism.

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The Scott Walker project was making him governor for life kind of.

Yeah, the Scott Walker project was not just making him governor for life and the Republican Party the dominant party for life. It was having that be the model that would then be exported all across the country. They talked very explicitly about the Wisconsin model when they did things like go after unions or dismantle campaign finance laws or pass new restrictions on voting—those are things they wanted to export all across the country. And in many ways, they did. Now, of course, lots of other Republicans have done lots of other undemocratic things, whether it’s in Ohio or North Carolina or you name the state. But Wisconsin Republicans have prided themselves on being a national leader when it comes to the kind of policies that they’re trying to pass.

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In the last few years, the pendulum began to swing back in Wisconsin. First, Gov. Tony Evers was elected, who’s a Democrat. Is that where you’d place that to, the turn?

Yeah, for sure, because that ended the Scott Walker era in Wisconsin. Then, of course, a month after Evers was elected, the Republican Legislature convened this unprecedented lame-duck session and stripped power from the new Democratic governor.

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And there was a lawsuit there, right? It got appealed to the state Supreme Court, and they upheld what the Legislature had done.

They upheld most of what the Legislature had done. Because remember, up until April of 2023, there had been a conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court for 15 years. And there was this symbiotic relationship between the Legislature and the state Supreme Court. The Legislature would do things that would make it easier for Republicans to win a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court would in turn uphold all of the controversial policies passed by the state Legislature. Every once in a while, there would be a split, but for the most part, over and over for the past decade plus, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has basically acted as a branch of the Republican Legislature.

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When that happened, did Democrats immediately set their sights on the Supreme Court?

Yeah. It’s been a long process to take back the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Everyone realizes that if you can’t dislodge Republicans in the Legislature, which is basically impossible right now because of gerrymandering, and the Legislature has stripped power from the state’s Democratic governor, then really the only vehicle to hold the Legislature accountable is the state Supreme Court. And that’s why it was such a big deal when progressives gained a 4-to-3 majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April because it suddenly made it possible to think about striking down the gerrymandered maps, striking down the anti-union laws, striking down the voter suppression laws. Now, this is still a court. It’s not just going to rubber stamp all of these policies. There’s a process it has to go through, and inevitably courts move slower than people would like. They’re not as sweeping as people would usually like, but there’s a sense that possibilities existed for unpopular and anti-democratic policies to be rolled back with this new Supreme Court majority that hadn’t existed for the previous 15 years.

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And we should underline that this state Supreme Court, it could possibly rule on the gerrymandered maps. And that’s the thing that undergirds everything else.

Exactly. The gerrymandered maps are the concrete of the foundation. If those stay in place, the structure still exists. You have to get rid of that foundation because that’s what has kept Republicans in power over and over. And that is what has allowed them to pass all of the unpopular policies or keep them in place, like the 1849 abortion ban. If the Legislature’s not so gerrymandered, those policies will start to change.

In April, when Janet Protasiewicz was elected, it shifted the court to the balance of power on the state Supreme Court, to the left for the first time in 15 years.Just a day after she was sworn in, Democrats filed lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps, in the hope that those cases would make it to the newly left-leaning court. 

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Republicans were also moving fast, though. Almost as soon as Protasiewicz was in the mix, in some cases before she was even elected, they were saying the state should impeach her, because of these comments she made, on the campaign trail:  “So let’s be clear here: The maps are rigged. Bottom line. Absolutely positively rigged. They do not accurately represent the people in this state, they do not reflect accurately representation neither the state Assembly or the state Senate. They are rigged, period.” 

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Republicans say she should recuse herself from any case she’s expressed an opinion about, including those all-important maps. If she doesn’t recuse, she should get impeached. 

Is that a valid argument? 

No, because she hasn’t actually said how she’s going to rule on any kind of case. Judges are elected in Wisconsin, so they have to take positions on things. It’s not like they’re appointed. It’s not like the U.S. Supreme Court. They campaign for office, and they frequently cite their positions on issues. The Republicans and the conservatives on the Wisconsin Supreme Court have done things like compared abortion to the Holocaust and slavery, said that Planned Parenthood is a wicked organization, but they haven’t recused themselves from cases challenging the state’s 1849 abortion ban.

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The other thing to note is that the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court wrote the state’s recusal laws. There’s no criteria for recusing yourself. You don’t have to recuse yourself if you took money from somebody. Nothing that Janet Protasiewicz did would rise to the level of recusal. And even if you argued that she should recuse herself, failure to recuse in no way should lead to impeachment. Even if you believe that she shouldn’t have said those things, that she should be impeached for it would have absolutely no precedent in any state, not just in Wisconsin.

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I’m struck by this irony that Republicans made these really lax recusal rules, and now they’re crying foul when a Democrat comes in.

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That’s the problem for Republicans is they created this system with the understanding that they would rule forever, and they don’t rule forever anymore. Now they’re trying to weaponize the very system that they built. Based on every precedent from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, there’s no basis for Janet Protasiewicz to recuse herself. And there’s no basis certainly for her to be impeached. But nonetheless, that seems to be the road that Wisconsin Republicans are willing to go down right now.

What’s the timeline for some kind of impeachment proceeding if it’s going to happen here?

That’s a little bit unknowable right now. There are briefings before the Wisconsin Supreme Court on whether Janet Protasiewicz should recuse herself. I would not expect her to recuse based on the precedents that have been set by the conservatives on the court. But I will say that Republicans have the power to impeach her. All it takes is a simple majority of the state Assembly.

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Because that doesn’t mean she’s convicted. It just means that we’re investigating.

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If a majority of the Assembly impeaches her, she is sidelined indefinitely, even if the state Senate doesn’t convict her. There’s no timetable for the state Senate to have to act.

So, they could just press pause on her taking power. Could the governor appoint someone to fill her seat?

Only if she was convicted or acquitted by the Senate or she resigned. If the Senate does nothing or she does nothing, then she’s just caught in this state of purgatory for an indefinite period of time. They have the power to do this. But I don’t know if they have the power to control what would happen as a result

What do you think would happen?

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I think there would be a tremendous backlash against Republicans if they were to impeach a state Supreme Court justice simply because she was prepared to strike down their gerrymandered maps. I think there would be a huge national outcry as well. So, this could help Republicans in the Legislature, but it could also hurt them in all of the other national races that are happening, including the presidential race in 2024.

The question is just how much pain the Republicans are willing to take on themselves.

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My feeling is any amount of pain to preserve the gerrymandered maps, because without the gerrymandered maps their grip on power is slipping away. Under fair maps, they could very well win a majority. Nobody is saying that Democrats have a foolproof majority if the gerrymandered amounts are struck down. But under fair maps, there’s no way Republicans are going to get two-thirds of the seats in the state Senate and 65 percent of the seats in the state House. Republicans want to maintain this near supermajority in both houses indefinitely. And they’re going to cling to the gerrymandered maps as long as they can.

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I’ve been impressed by how busy the Republicans in Wisconsin have been, because it’s not just this potential impeachment idea that they’re focusing in on. The Republicans are also trying to fire the chief elections officer in their state.

That’s another situation of trying to weaponize the institutions that they created.

Huh. Explain.

Wisconsin Republicans created the elections commission they’re now vilifying. They unanimously appointed the election administrator they’re now trying to fire. Back in 2015, Wisconsin Republicans got rid of the panel of retired judges that oversaw voting laws and campaign finance laws in the state. And they replaced it with this commission called the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

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The idea was that it would be modeled after the Federal Election Commission, that it would have three Democrats and three Republican appointees. Now, I think the idea was that basically that was a recipe for gridlock, and they didn’t want it to do anything.

That’s what happens at the federal level for sure. 

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Exactly. Nobody in their right mind would say, “Let’s model something on the Federal Election Commission.” It’s a completely dysfunctional institution. But they create the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and then they appointed an election administrator who was unanimously confirmed by the state Senate in 2019. Someone by the name of Meagan Wolfe.

So, she’s been in charge since this whole thing started. When did she first start facing Republican pushback?

It started to come to a head in 2020 because the commission started to make rules for voting during COVID that Republicans would later blame for Donald Trump’s defeat in the state.

I remember the primary election in April 2020 in Wisconsin. It was really messy.

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It was a disaster. It happened in April of 2020, three or four weeks into COVID. There were hourlong lines because there were only five polling places instead of 180 in Milwaukee. There was a famous sign someone held up that said, “This is ridiculous.” The GOP Assembly speaker was in full PPE working the polls when he told everyone it was safe to vote in person. The Wisconsin Election Commission became embroiled in this whole fight, and they tried to take steps to make voting safe during the pandemic. They did things like sending absentee ballots to nursing homes instead of sending in-person voting deputies to assist elderly voters. These were things that were relatively uncontroversial at the time. They were done on a bipartisan basis. They were done in a unanimous basis. But later, Republicans started to scapegoat these things as Democrats had illegally rigged the rules for voting during the pandemic. And they began to scapegoat Meagan Wolfe and the Wisconsin Elections Commission for Donald Trump’s 22,000 vote defeat in Wisconsin.

How did this go down?

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Republicans have basically compared Meagan Wolfe to Hillary Clinton. A former state Supreme Court justice named Michael Gableman was tapped to lead a sprawling 13-month investigation into the 2020 election that made a lot of headlines but uncovered no truth of fraud, and Gableman basically said, “We’ve seen the schtick before. Blond hair, pearls,” basically comparing her to Hillary Clinton.

There was a hearing before the Legislature recently in which Republicans said, “We don’t just want to fire her, we want to arrest her.” The whole “lock her up” vibe has very much been targeted at Meagan Wolfe, who is a nonpartisan administrator. She’s a bureaucrat. She doesn’t even make decisions! The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, makes decisions. And she implements those decisions. She doesn’t create voting laws. She doesn’t make up voting laws. She is purely a bureaucrat.

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So last week, the state Senate in Wisconsin voted to oust Wolfe from her post. But now there’s disagreement about whether they can actually do that. What’s going on there?

Once again, the precedent of the Wisconsin Supreme Court comes back to bite them. What Republicans have done over and over to prevent the state’s Democratic governor from filling key seats is not to reappoint people, but just allow them to stay in their job after their positions have expired. They’ve repeatedly done this, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld this tactic, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now with Meagan Wolfe. The commission deadlocked on whether to reappoint her.

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Because it’s half Republicans and half Democrats.

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Exactly. You need a majority on the Wisconsin Elections Commission to put her nomination before the Senate. Because there was not that majority vote, her nomination was not properly before the state Senate, meaning they don’t actually have the power to fire her. So, it was largely a performative vote to appease election deniers. There were a lot of election deniers in the gallery who cheered when the Wisconsin Senate took this vote. But the state attorney general is challenging it right now in court. And Meagan Wolfe basically has said, “I’m not leaving absent a court telling me to leave.” And she doesn’t have to leave. But, of course, again, this is going before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. You can see the relationship between these two entities. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is frequently the final arbiter on the most hot-button issues in Wisconsin. And that’s one reason why Republicans are trying so hard to sideline the new liberal majority on that court.

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Even if Meagan Wolfe isn’t fired, have Republicans in the legislature undermined her so much that it’s very difficult for her to do her job?

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Yes. And not only that, they’ve laid the groundwork to contest the next election.

Whoa.

Well, they’re going to argue that she’s illegally in her job, and therefore she doesn’t have the authority to run Wisconsin’s elections. And if the Wisconsin Elections Commission does things that they don’t like, they’re just going to view that as illegitimate. Now, that’s not going to have any kind of legal grounding, but just rhetorically. Clearly, they are they are once again setting up to make Meagan Wolfe the scapegoat if Donald Trump loses Wisconsin again in 2024.

That’s such a 12-dimensional chess thing.

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Ultimately, they would like to get rid of her and put in place someone more compliant. They’re just hoping that they make her life so miserable that she’s just going to step down. It isn’t like the election deniers have gone away in Wisconsin. They are very, very strong. They are constantly influencing the Republican Party. The Republican establishment is constantly taking steps to try to appease the election-denying wing of the Republican Party. The vote to oust Meagan Wolfe is just the latest example of that. This remains an incredibly influential faction within the state GOP. And as long as they vote in primaries, as long as they make up majorities of the electorate in these gerrymandered districts, they’re going to go a long way toward determining the actions of the Republican Party in the state.

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Both the effort to impeach Judge Protasiewicz and the effort to fire Meagan Wolfe, they involve so much irony. Republicans are ignoring laws or rules that they championed up and down both of these cases. They’re basically just throwing them out the window and saying, “We don’t like this.” Is this standard political hypocrisy, or is something weirder at play?

It’s more disturbing than standard political hypocrisy because it’s so anti-democratic. There’s lots of instances in our lives where we do something that involves some act of hypocrisy. But what this is doing is it’s taking the anti-democratic actions of the Wisconsin Republican Party that were already at a 10 and pushing it to a 12. They’re going beyond what anyone thought was possible. Trying to remove two of the most prominent people in Wisconsin politics right now—the nonpartisan administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the newly elected state Supreme Court justice—shows the extreme lengths they’ll go to try to undermine fair elections in 2024 to keep their hold on power. And it’s a chilling preview of what the Republican Party could do all across the country, because once you start to break these democratic norms, nothing is viewed as unbreakable anymore. There’s no norm that you won’t decide to eventually topple.

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