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It is time to recall Annette Ziegler
Those who are not particularly enamored of democracy want nothing more than to remove the people from the process of selecting judges.
They favor "merit selection" of Supreme Court justices by elite committees that take care of their own while citizens are sidelined.
If you want a flavor of what a "merit selection" future would look like, consider the case of Justice Annette Ziegler.
As a Washington County Circuit Court judge, Ziegler regularly ruled in cases involving West Bend Savings Bank, a major financial institution in the county that counted among its paid directors her wealthy husband.
That was a classic conflict of interest. Any pre-law student at a community college would recognize the violation.
Yet Ziegler denied any wrongdoing during her 2007 campaign for a place on the high court, deliberately and repeatedly lying to the voters of Wisconsin.
For her wrongdoing, she should have been removed from the bench. Instead, Ziegler threw some money around -- writing $17,000 in face-saving checks to the state Ethics Board. She was let off with little more than a slap on the wrist by the Judicial Commission and a gentle reprimand from her colleagues on the Supreme Court.
This was the first time the court had ever disciplined one of its own. But the discipline left Ziegler on the bench.
Behind closed doors, acting in the name of the citizens of Wisconsin but without the informed consent of those citizens, Annette Ziegler was effectively let off the hook.
That's how things work when the people are not part of the process.
But Wisconsin is still a democratic state. And the Ziegler scandal does not have to end with a behind-closed-doors, insider "exoneration" of a wrongdoing judge.
Ziegler has committed some of the most serious ethics violations in the history of Wisconsin. She has been caught lying, repeatedly, to the voters. She now has so many conflicts that she regularly recuses herself from sitting on major cases before the court. Since taking her seat on the bench, Ziegler has declined to participate in 25 proceedings. The six other justices recused themselves from a combined total of 29 cases during the same period.
Ziegler is ethically challenged. She has lied to the voters of Wisconsin. And she is not serving fully or well on the Supreme Court.
She should be recalled and removed from the court.
The recall procedure is a demanding one -- more than 540,000 petition signatures would have to be gathered over two months in order to force an election to decide whether Ziegler should stay on the court. The bar is set high because recalls involve the overturning of an election result in the middle of an official's term. But it is appropriate to recall Ziegler because of her serious wrongdoing, her inability to fulfill her responsibilities on the court and, above all, her lies to the voters.
File photo
Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler now has so many conflicts she has recused herself from almost as many cases as all the other justices combined.
