Gov. Evers signs fair maps for Wisconsin

On Feb. 19, with an array of smiling Democrats standing behind him Gov. Tony Evers signed a law enacting legislative maps crafted by the Evers’ administration and previously submitted by him to the state Supreme Court.

The maps will be used in the fall elections.

Legislative Republicans passed the maps as the lesser of evils, in their eyes, fearing what maps the state Supreme Court might adopt if the legislature and the governor failed to reach agreement. The maps passed by Republicans will create many more competitive seats and boost Democrats’ chances of retaking control of the state Legislature, but Republicans feared a map drawn by the liberal Supreme Court majority would have been even worse.

While Evers’s own maps triumphed, they did so with Republican support, as 14 Democrats in the state Senate and 33 in the Assembly voted against the maps. Many of the opponents were standing behind the governor and praising him after he signed the legislation.

“The maps signed into law today signify a huge win for the people of Wisconsin,” Senate Democratic leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said. “For more than a decade, issues that Wisconsinites cared deeply about were largely ignored because Republicans had rigged the redistricting process. This November, Republicans will finally face a constituency that reflects the will of the people and one that will hold them accountable for more than a decade of unchecked power.”

Hesselbein said she and her Democratic colleagues had long argued that voters should choose their elected officials, not the other way around, and that would now become a reality. 

She said the governor’s maps had restored fair maps and representative democracy  in Wisconsin.   

Right after the vote, Hesselbein was singing a different tune, however, issuing a statement with Democratic Sens. Chris Larson of Milwaukee, Mark Spreitzer of Beloit and Jeff Smith of Brunswick, calling legislative Republicans the least trustworthy people in the state when it comes to redistricting. 

“For more than a decade they’ve gerrymandered our state lines and comfortably governed with unfettered power and no accountability to the public,” Hesselbein and her colleagues stated. “We will not participate in Republicans’ shady political schemes to maintain their manufactured majority. The amendment containing the maps received neither a public hearing nor a committee vote and was not made public until after today’s legislative session began. That is not how the government is supposed to work.”

It wasn’t just the process that made the Democrats unhappy.

“And this map wouldn’t even take effect until November 2024—meaning that the map passed today wouldn’t be used for special elections or recalls, which includes the current recall efforts against speaker Robin Vos,” they said. “If this was a genuine proposal by Republicans, why would they wait any longer to implement fair maps in Wisconsin?”

Republicans should not have a voice in fashioning new maps, the Democrats stated.

“The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Wisconsin’s current maps are unconstitutional,” the lawmakers said. “Republicans hold an illegitimate majority and should not influence the state’s new maps. Their motives today, like their actions of the past decade, are ill-intentioned and self-serving. Wisconsinites deserve better.” 

GOP: Better than the alternative

Republicans said they were making the best of a bad situation.

State Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) said the outcome of the redistricting lawsuit was decided on election night 2023, and, having already announced she would reject the existing maps, it was certain that the new Janet “Protasiewicz court” would unconstitutionally take over redistricting.

“The Republicans tried to pass Iowa-style redistricting, just like Democrats have proposed for 15 years, but the governor promised to veto it,” Wanggaard said. “The Republicans then tried to give the governor 99.7 percent of what he wanted, but the governor vetoed it.”

With a rogue Supreme Court making up redistricting laws from whole cloth, Wanggaard said Republicans couldn’t trust them to be fair. 

“Democrats invested tens of millions of dollars to buy the Supreme Court, and now have come to collect,” he said. “It’s why Gov. Evers vetoed 99.7 percent of what he wanted and Democrats voted against the governor’s maps — the court was poised to give them 120 percent of what they wanted. The Supreme Court would have chosen between one of four Democratic gerrymanders.”

And so, Wanggaard said, Republicans were faced with a difficult choice. 

“Evers’s maps aren’t good,” he said. “They aren’t fair. They are gerrymandered. But of the four options the Supreme Court is willing to consider, it is the most fair and the least gerrymandered. Republicans were not stuck between a rock and hard place. It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned or led to the guillotine. We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.”

State Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Cedarburg) sound a similar theme.

“After spending $10 million to purchase a justice on the Supreme Court, the new liberal activist majority delivered on a campaign promise to re-litigate the previously upheld legislative boundaries and rig the maps to benefit Democrats,” Stroebel said. “Today, Governor Evers signed his own legislative maps into law.”

Those maps are a political gerrymander, Stroebel said. 

“They specifically and disproportionately target Republican incumbents (including myself) and pit them against each other, pairing 29 incumbent Republicans together across 15 different districts while only pairing four Democrats together across both houses,” he said. “His maps are the exact type of partisan gerrymandering that Democrats have claimed to oppose for over a decade.”

But, Stroebel said, as frustrating as it was, GOP lawmakers had to operate within the reality that they were given. 

“This is a reality where the state Supreme Court had clearly signaled its intentions,” he said. “It’s a reality in which the liberal majority on the state Supreme Court discards years of precedent to deliver on a campaign promise. Nevertheless, I voted to pass the governor’s maps, which are now law. Given the situation at hand, I felt that it was necessary to preserve the legislature’s constitutional right to draw the maps and avoid setting a more dangerous precedent where an activist court can strip other branches of their lawful responsibilities.”

State Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said Evers made the right choice by signing the maps passed by the Legislature, rather than vetoing the bill and placing the map-making authority in the hands of the partisan-leaning Supreme Court. 

“Although I still strongly disagree with the intent behind the governor’s map to draw numerous sitting legislators out of their district, leaving thousands of Wisconsinites without proper representation, this map contained the least amount of change out of the four liberal-drawn maps that were recommended to the Supreme Court,” Felzkowski said.

In less than a four-year timespan, Felzkowski said, her 12th Senate district has held three different shapes, with the lines fluctuating and shifting, changing the representation of numerous communities and thousands of citizens. 

“It’s my hope that this will be the last alteration to these maps that we experience in this decade,” she said. “As the maps change yet again, it is with a heavy heart that I say farewell to Menominee County and the Menominee Tribe, southern portions of Oconto County, townships in northern Shawano, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Band. At the same time, I am excited to represent new areas of northern Wisconsin, including the city of Marinette and the rest of Marinette County, and several additional communities in northern Marathon County.”

Voting rights concerns

For his part, Evers said he had fulfilled his pledge to secure fair legislative maps for the state, undoing more than a decade of what he called some of the most gerrymandered maps in the United States. 

“I will always try to do the right thing for our state,” Evers said. “Wisconsinites want fair maps, and Wisconsinites deserve fair maps. So, today, I’m enacting fair maps for the great state of Wisconsin. When I promised I wanted fair maps — not maps that are better for one party or another — I damn well meant it. Wisconsin is not a red state or a blue state — we’re a purple state, and I believe our maps should reflect that basic fact.”

Assembly speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said the people of the state deserved certainty and Evers signed the most Republican-leaning maps out of all the maps being considered by the state Supreme Court. 

“We sent him those maps, not because they are fair but because the people of Wisconsin deserve certainty in state government,” Vos said. “This legislation brings to end this sham of a litigation designed to deliver judicially gerrymandered Democrat maps to the liberal special interest groups funding said litigation.”

In the end all the Democratic effort will be for naught, Vos said.

“This fall Republicans will prove that we can win on any maps because we have the better policy ideas for the state of Wisconsin,” he said. “We are happy that the governor’s signature brings to an end decades of liberal special interest litigation over maps in Wisconsin.”

However, Rep. LaKeshia Myers (D-Milwaukee) cautioned that the Democratic victory could prove pyrrhic. 

“While many will count the governor’s signing today as a victory for fair maps, I am disappointed at the lack of agency on the part of the Wisconsin legislature,” Myers said. “The lack of willingness by legislative Republicans to engage in a genuine process to arrive at a fair map has been disheartening. The last minute scramble to pass the governor’s map was an eleventh hour GOP maneuver, put in place to silence the Wisconsin Supreme Court and kill any decision it could possibly make.”

And Myers said the enacted maps are still not “truly fair.”

“There are concerns regarding the Voting Rights Act and how communities of like-interest are impacted, especially in Senate District 4, a district that includes the north shore suburb of Shorewood, and Milwaukee’s central city,” she said. “It is my hope that the court would still take these issues into consideration to arrive at a contiguous metric of electoral equity.  Anything else would be a disservice to the African American voters, who are overwhelmingly situated in this district.”

The Legislative Black Caucus echoed Myers’s concerns.

“Gov. Evers signed into law his version of fair maps for Wisconsin,” caucus chairwoman Rep. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee) said. “As a caucus, we have stood and continued to fight for fair maps in Wisconsin for the past decade. Though this is a step in the right direction to fight against the Republican gerrymander, we have concerns if this map violates the Voting Rights Act.”

Drake said the caucus would be seeking additional experts and input to confirm if this map upholds the Voting Rights Act and move accordingly. 

“All of our communities deserve maps that are fair and deserve maps where all communities can choose their candidate of choice,” she said.