Wisconsin Republicans Won’t Impeach a Supreme Court Justice for No Reason, After All

Wisconsin’s narrow Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court is safe—for now.

On Thursday, state Republicans said that they would back off of threats to remove newly seated Justice Janet Protasiewicz.

Instead, they’ll give the liberal judge a chance, opting to focus on what she’ll do “in office,” said the state’s Republican Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos, at a news conference on Thursday, adding that impeachment was still “on the table” if the court ruled against conservative causes.

Protasiewicz’s presence on the bench is crucial for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, offering liberals an ideological majority in the court for the first time in 15 years and at least until 2025, when another liberal justice’s 10-year term is set to expire. This thin majority is crucial, given that the court’s conservative majority had pushed the state right on a number of key issues and cemented an absurd, pro-Republican gerrymander.

Protasiewicz, whose campaign was the most expensive race for a seat on a state Supreme Court in U.S. history, has infuriated Republicans since she announced her candidacy by broadcasting her views on topics like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental protection. She’s criticized the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps, which cement a GOP stronghold on the state, as “rigged” and “unfair.”

“If they decide to inject their own political bias inside the process and not follow the law, we have the ability to go to the Supreme Court and we also have the ability to hold her accountable to the voters of Wisconsin,” Vos said on Thursday.

Days after Protasiewicz took her seat last week, a suit challenging Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislative maps was filed directly to the state’s highest court.

The highly contested maps, which were drawn up by Republicans in 2011, give the GOP such a firm stronghold in the battleground state that Democratic wins in 12 of the last 15 statewide elections haven’t budged conservatives’ two-third majority in the state Senate or their hold on 64 of 99 seats in the Assembly, reported the Times.

Other cases are also anticipated to reach the new liberal majority, with a suit challenging the state’s abortion ban expected to hit the bench sometime next year.

Israel has warned the United Nations that all of northern Gaza’s roughly 1.1 million citizens must flee to south of Wadi Gaza within 24 hours—an impossible task and one that will likely lead to sizable civilian casualties.

“Whoever wants to save his life should go South,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a press conference on Friday. Earlier this week, Gallant announced plans to cut off water, food, and electricity from Palestine, saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

Now, after a week of constant airstrikes, which have killed at least 1,799 people and wounded an additional 6,388, Gallant insisted that Israel does not want to harm civilian Palestinians. “Hamas is camouflaging itself inside civilian population, and we are going to go in and dismantle its infrastructure,” he said. The airstrikes came after Hamas militants slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians in surprise attacks over the weekend.

It’s not clear what “infrastructure” Gallant was referring to, but in a statement to the residents of Gaza City, the Israel Defense Forces said that they believed Hamas was hiding in tunnels beneath the homes of Palestinians. The Israeli military did not specify what its plans for Gaza City were, but it’s likely that this warning could signal that the Israeli military is planning a ground operation.

U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric voiced the U.N.’s disapproval of Israel’s plan.

“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” Dujarric said. On Thursday, U.N. independent experts condemned Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against Palestinians, as well as Hamas’s deadly attacks against Israelis.

In a statement, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan said that the “U.N.’s response to Israel’s early warning to the residents of Gaza is shameful!”

This ultimatum from the Israeli military only emphasizes the power differential between Israeli and Palestine. Israel has acted with impunity as a U.S.-backed superpower and now expects to remove one million people from their homes with limited warning after a week of deadly siege.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise dropped out of the speaker race on Thursday evening, just 30 hours after receiving the Republican nomination. With a government shutdown looming, it is becoming increasingly clear that no sitting House Republican currently has enough votes to become speaker.

Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump ally and Freedom Caucus founder, has already started calling around to secure votes for his nomination after collecting 46 percent of the vote prior to losing to Scalise, reported Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman. How Jordan—who only received 99 votes from his colleagues earlier this week—will attain the roughly 217 votes needed to take the gavel is unclear.

Jordan’s candidacy will prove an uphill battle, and it’s currently unclear whether he can win over hard-liners who voted for Scalise. Moderates are also wary of backing a Jordan nomination, fearing that the far-right candidate and presidential election denier will hurt their reelection prospects in swing districts.

So far, Representatives Austin Scott, Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz Balart, Ann Wagner, and Mike Simpson are among the Republicans who have confirmed they won’t get behind Jordan. Since the Ohio Republican cannot be expected to win any Democratic votes, he will need a nearly unified caucus. He does not have that right now.

Some Republicans, including Representatives Tom McClintock and Carlos Gimenez, are even floating the idea of bringing former Speaker Kevin McCarthy back, an unprecedented move with a slim chance of succeeding, given McCarthy’s lack of sway with several far-right members of the House Republican Caucus.

Yet another possibility remains—House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who made a bid to be majority leader in the early hours of Scalise’s nomination to speaker, may run for the top position in the House instead, according to The Washington Post.

Amid all the drama, Republicans are also experiencing attendance issues. After nearly two weeks without a speaker, some party members chose not to show up at a Friday morning meeting behind closed doors, reported Punchbowl News.

Scalise’s loss is the latest evidence that the party would rather cannibalize itself than lead the country.

Tara McGowan wants news sites to “take their paywalls down” for critical 2024 election coverage and develop new business strategies.

Speaking at The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit, the Courier Newsroom founder and publisher discussed how readers are more likely to passively consume free information online than information behind a paywall. 

“I do not disparage paywalls,” McGowan told The New Republic after the event. “However, if your mission and the reason that you exist is to inform the public … you have got to figure out a way to make the most important information your audiences need to be informed citizens and informed and engaged voters available for free.”

McGowan explained how paywalls are great at bringing in revenue, filling in for traditional advertising revenue, but many readers can’t or won’t pay for them. The need for new business models, combined with increasing distrust from readers, means that the news media is “in the midst of an existential crisis right now” according to McGowan.

“The reason that the media is as bad as it is, the reason they’re as obsessed with Trump as it is, is because it makes them money,” McGowan said. “A lot of news organizations have not evolved to meet people where they are on social media platforms because they don’t have a way of monetizing that.”

Increasingly obsolete themes she has noticed in news media include longer articles, dense newsletters, and unbalanced coverage. McGowan is specifically concerned with how organizations cover inaccurate sides of a story for the sake of appearing neutral. She also believes there is too much negativity in news coverage.

“[Editors and reporters are] thinking about balance in their reporting as ‘I need to give as much space in my article to both sides of an argument,’ even if one side is not accurate,’” she pointed out. “And when you only inform people about the bad things, then you are contributing to cynicism and mistrust in government, and that’s really bad for democracy.”

Unlike other newsrooms, McGowan said the Courier Newsroom runs randomized control treatment experiments to measure the impact of its journalism on its audience. “We’re able to survey and analyze voter turnout records of audiences to see if the people who get our news on social media are more likely to vote, compared to the ones who don’t have the same demographic, and then we do the same thing for our email newsletter program,” she said.

For newsletters, the newsroom gathers a small number of subscribers, and political reporting is then removed from their newsletters so they just get lifestyle content, and then they are surveyed. There’s also an audience that only receives the political reporting, and they are surveyed as well.  

“We’ve actually proven that we increase informed voter participation,” McGowan said. “There needs to be a lot more introspection in the news media business.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s multimillion-dollar overhaul of the New College of Florida is rapidly turning into a disaster.

On Wednesday, the college reported reported that its numbers were in dramatic decline. In its last year of operation, the school has more than doubled its normal loss of first-year students between fall semesters, according to an announcement by the college’s provost.

That marks the lowest retention rate of first-year students in the college’s history, reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

New College, a school that was proudly unconventional until the far-right governor chose to give it a conservative revamp, saw 27 percent of its student body drop out.

Despite the dip, the school’s total enrollment was still up from last year, bringing a record 325 students to the school, according to the college’s fact book. That may be in part because the school has lowered its standards for admission, according to the Herald-Tribune, which cited lower grade-point averages and test scores of incoming students than those of previous classes.

Under DeSantis’s supervision, the school has seen some radical changes. The college’s leadership team has been upended: Six members of the board of trustees have been replaced by DeSantis allies, while the college’s president was ousted and replaced with the administration’s former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran. The school has also suffered a faculty exodus, the elimination of the college’s diversity office, and the firing of its academic librarian.

What DeSantis once described as a culture of “woke indoctrination” has been replaced by one of censorship: Student murals have been painted over, and student orientation leaders were forbidden from wearing pins expressing support for Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ+ community, reported The New York Times.

The U.S. Department of Education is also investigating a complaint that the new version of the school discriminated against disabled students, reported CNN. Another federal complaint was filed in August claiming that the new leadership of the school discriminated against LGBTQ+ students, effectively driving them out from the campus.