An Eastern Wisconsin Senator was not on board with accepting Governor Tony Evers’ political maps.
Seehafer News spoke with Senator Andre Jacque of De Pere about the vote, and he told us he doesn’t want to question the motives of his colleagues but called the maps submitted by the governor “a partisan gerrymander.”
“They clearly took into account things outside of traditional redistricting construction,” he explained. “I just felt that we can’t really capitulate to the governor’s demands. We should fight it.”
Sen. Jacque did admit that Republicans in Madison had a figurative gun to their head but said that doesn’t mean they should have backed down.
“I feel that we can’t be complicit to gerrymandering ourselves to the whims of the governor and the democratic party,” he said.
One term that has been thrown around a lot in the discussion surrounding the political maps is “liberal majority on the court,” which, of course, refers to the Supreme Court.
We asked Sen. Jacque to clarify that judges are supposed to be non-partisan but rather read the letter of the law and interpret it.
He confirmed that is indeed correct, but that is not how many justices of the court have acted.
While the justices don’t run as Republicans or Democrats, when a candidate is backed by a party, as Sen. Jacque stated, “perception becomes reality.”
“During the campaign trail, you had a candidate for justice already saying how they were going to rule on a specific case and inviting the very litigation that would revisit a situation where none of the facts have changed, only the composition of the people deciding it,” he said. “I think that’s dangerous in terms of how that can lead to instability in our court system.”
And, as Sen. Jacque stated, that instability degrades the confidence that the public and the legislature have in the highest court in the state, especially, “If that’s going to be the basis for decision making…we are going to squint and find some way to engineer an outcome, regardless of what the law would dictate.”
As far as fixing the issue, Sen. Jacque was blunt, saying “I’m not sure how we put the genie back in the bottle.”
Sen. Jacque’s team has sent us a copy of the maps that Governor Evers’ proposed.
There are some significant changes to Eastern Wisconsin, and we will go into those in more detail on Friday after we have had more time to look them over.
