Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler misquoted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a recent dissent, stating that the country’s highest court said the opposite of what it ruled in a 2023 redistricting decision. Ziegler’s opinion pushed back against the state Supreme Court’s decision to appoint a pair of three-judge panels to decide challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
On Nov. 26, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that two lawsuits alleging the state’s congressional maps are unconstitutional should be heard by the panels because of a 2011 law requiring that action. The Court’s four liberal justices were partially joined in the decision by conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, who wrote in a concurring opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s decision to appoint the six judges who will sit on the panels.
In a dissenting opinion written by Ziegler and joined by Justice Rebecca Bradley, the two conservatives argued the decision was made “in furtherance of delivering partisan, political advantage to the Democratic Party.”
But Ziegler wrote in her opinion the U.S. Supreme Court had recently affirmed that “the role of state courts in congressional redistricting is ‘exceedingly limited.’”
Ziegler cited the Court’s 2023 decision in Moore v. Harper — which was about the North Carolina Supreme Court’s authority to weigh in on congressional redistricting. The phrase “exceedingly limited” does not appear once in the decision. In that case, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court found the opposite of what Ziegler claimed.
“State courts retain the authority to apply state constitutional restraints when legislatures act under the power conferred upon them by the Elections Clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
The misquote was first reported by Slate and Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy.
The day after the decision was published, the opinion was withdrawn from the state court’s website and replaced with a different version. The change wasn’t publicly acknowledged by the Court and only removes the quotation marks around the phrase “exceedingly limited.” The correction does not change Ziegler’s mischaracterization of the decision in Moore v. Harper.
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