Walker thinks Supreme Court justices who got aid from his pals can objectively consider the Doe case
http://www.uppitywis.org/blogarticle/je-r-cuse-walker-thinks-supreme-court-justices-who-got-aid-his-p
Gov. Scott Walker offered up his usual tasty looking but utterly non-nutritious word salad when asked by a news reporter why the four conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court should not recuse themselves if civil lawsuits aiming to blunt the John Doe investigation are taken up by the court. That, of course, is the John Doe investigation looking into Walker's own campaign activities.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today noted that those four conservative justices, forming the court's majority, all have received heavy financial support from three conservative interest groups. The Doe inquiry has looked at those same three groups for possibly breaching the firewall between candidate campaigns and supposedly independent political action. How, asked the reporter, could “justices” who collectively have benefited from more than a million dollars of “independent” campaign support fairly rule on a case involving that very same kind of support from the same groups on behalf of Walker and Republican state senators in recall elections? Walker, to no one's surprise, replied that he did not think any of the justices needed to recuse themselves from any case involving the Doe inquiry.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted the governor's strange, meandering argument, in which he tried to claim that the potential conflict of interest “cuts both ways,” because (this is so silly, but he said it) the justices who didn't receive such support would be embittered as a result and thus face their own apparent conflict of interest. In fact, he suggested they might have an even bigger conflict! "You can make the argument that they'd be even more bitter about money being spent against them,” Walker said.
Yes, Walker's argument is that any partisan bias by justices who benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars of independent political expenditures is totally if not overly counterbalanced by the mere possibility -- thought up by Walker -- that justices who didn't get the same financial help would be embittered and thus themselves even more biased in the other direction! Wow. Word salad, indeed.
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