Federal Appointment for Louis Butler: More “Open Defiance” of Wisconsin Voters
November 19, 2009
As American Courthouse readers will recall, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler was unceremoniously dumped by Wisconsin voters last April – the first sitting justice to lose his/her seat in four decades, a terrific Wall Street Journal editorial tells us. His reward for being the favorite martyr of the trial bar/”merit” selection crowd? A lifetime appointment to the federal bench by President Obama.
Butler’s defeat was hardly surprising; in 2000, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly rejected him by a 2:1 margin. Governor Jim Doyle’s decision to go ahead and appoint Butler to the court anyway “overturned the clear results of the election,” wrote Charles Sykes for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and was in “open defiance” of the wishes of the people of Wisconsin.
Now, as the Journal points out, Wisconsin voters “will have years to contend with the decisions of a judge they made clear they would rather live without.” Earlier decisions by Justice Butler included rulings that “dismantled” Wisconsin’s medical liability reform and invented crackpot new theories opening innocent businesses to more abusive litigation. No wonder he was thrown out.
The Journal notes that Butler’s nomination shows “contempt for Wisconsin voters,” which is certainly true. It also signals that when it comes to the Obama Administration’s judicial nominations, special interest groups like the trial bar and the American Bar Association will be calling the shots.
Butler’s April 2008 defeat kicked off a national debate over judicial elections. The election results were used by the ABA and the trial bar in a push to end democratic state judicial elections and replace them with so-called “merit selection” committees. Wisconsin continues to support judicial elections and many in the state see the ABA for what it is: the last group the American people should put its faith in to produce fair jurists. It has become nothing more than a rubber stamp for the left…and that’s not right.