A corporation, but not a Gableman, is a person

CAPITOL KAOS

A person may request the supreme court to take jurisdiction of an original action by filing a petition which may be supported by a memorandum. — Wis. Stat. § 809.70

Bet you didn't know that person could be Mike Gableman.

Until yesterday, to be sure, when neither did anybody else.

A person may request the court to exercise its supervisory jurisdiction or its original jurisdiction to issue a prerogative writ over a court and the presiding judge, or other person or body, by filing a petition and supporting memorandum. — § 809.51

That is, § 809.70 or § 809.71. Either one or the other. Not and. I refer the reader to the small catalog of propositional operators contained in any introductory text on logic, beginning from Aristotle's (c. 360 BCE).

Now Huebsch (by his counsel the Department of Justice) is a person:

PETITION FOR SUPERVISORY WRIT PURSUANT TO WIS. STAT.
§ 809.71 — State ex rel. Michael D. Huebsch, 04.07.2011

Yet the following appeared at 4:45 p.m. on June 14, in an unsigned order of the court but reputedly the handiwork of Mike Gableman:

On June 6, 2011, this court ... heard argument addressing whether the court should accept either the certification or the petition for supervisory/original jurisdiction or both; the court also heard argument on the merits of the pending matters.

The certification was a separate case, and was dismissed. The forward slash conjoining 'supervisory' to 'original' is a fabrication from whole cloth. So-called conservative jurisprudence by typographical insertion.

In the Wisconsin statutes, the distinction between the court's supervisory and original jurisdictions is codified by their separate numberings:
§ 809.70 and § 809.71. The Department of Justice chose the latter.

It would not have occurred to the Department of Justice to petition the court to take jurisdiction of an original action because Ozanne v. Fitzgerald could not, obviously, be an original action for the purposes of the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. Hence the supervisory petition.

¶7 This court has granted the petition for an original action ...

No such petition existed, until the Gableman court manufactured it.

WMC's Mike Gableman, who a three-appellate-judge panel found in 2009 to have violated two separate provisions of the Wisconsin code of judicial ethics (Gableman was a judge on an "inferior court" — as Kevin St. John would have it — at the time) campaigned on a political platform of "strict constructionism" and the faithful adherence to legal texts.

Evidently those were lies as well.

And this is not the first time that Gableman has conjured a creative interpretation of the Supreme Court's jurisdictional authorities. The present instance is not of judicial activism, but of judicial arrogance.

Ironically, Gableman's cohort Justice Prosser purports to justify the court's exercising original jurisdiction by mysterious reference to the State constitution, according to an apparently broad reading of that document, or precisely that manner of reading denied to the people of Wisconsin, who sought only a reasonable — indeed, a practically de minimis — access to the legislative activities of their representatives.

The Republican legislative leaders betrayed even that.

Of course the largest irony of all is that the Gableman court attempts to validate its fiat on separation of powers grounds, but yesterday's decree indicates nothing except an amalgamation of partisan, political powers.

This space will return at the end of the month, fully recharged.