The Smell of Fear
By: Michaeljon Murphy
Director of Communications
Constitution Party of Wisconsin
Listening to conservative talk radio the day after the spring election was a bit of an adventure. The reaction was angst-filled about the 20% difference in the vote between Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar for State Supreme Court justice. It was said that non-partisan races are a thing of the past. It was said that the next conservative candidate should outright declare him/herself as a Republican and seek to gather as much GOP support as possible. The Republican Party itself was demonized for not doing enough to support “their candidate.” Except, of course, Lazar was not their candidate.
A Frightening Trend
Metropolitan Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I have to admit I did not follow the campaign closely. Taylor’s former position as legal counsel for Planned Parenthood told me enough that she was yet another activist. Apparently, she boasted about her activist mindset and was quite forthright in how she would change the law. Someone had said in an earlier judicial race that the opponent should have run for the legislature if she wanted to create law. Point well made. For the past two supreme court races, we have had winning candidates that appeared to be running for the legislature and completely misunderstand the function of the court. It is a frightening trend.
It’s All in the Interpretation
Lazar attempting to run as an “independent” while Taylor ran as an activist and legislator was a slow train wreck. When Lazar did comment on abortion, it appears she was fine with the current state of the “law” permitting abortion up to 20 weeks. I am fine with the current law – the actual law – State Statute 940.04, the 1849 law, which is a near total ban on abortion. Side note – we would need to build on that remove the exception for the life of the mother and reinstitute the penalties for the mother. It is the interpretation of the law that is all messed up.
How the court found that the statute applied only to “aborticide” and had no relation to elective abortion is a complete mystery. How this somehow translates into an allowance of murder up to 20 weeks is a similar puzzlement. I disdain to call such a thing a 20-week “ban.” It’s not a ban, but a permission slip. Some dear friends of mine for years had refused to use the word abortion because it was too broad of a term that could include even a miscarriage as a natural “termination of a pregnancy.” All pregnancies terminate at some point, by the way. My friends exclusively used the term aborticide because it spoke to the intentional killing of the unborn child. For the court to say that a statute against aborticide somehow applies only to a low-life criminal attacking a pregnant woman and not a pregnant woman hiring a paid assassin to intentionally kill her child makes no sense. Could we not have heard a legal opinion on that during the campaign trail? Is this not a judicial travesty of justice that needs a redo?
Pleading the Fifth
Back in the day of the contentious confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominees selected by Republican presidents, I watched many hearings where the nominees acted as though they were called as witnesses against themselves in a criminal court proceeding. There was little difference between someone repeatedly pleading the 5th amendment in an attempt not to incriminate him/herself. There was hedging, evading, hemming and hawing, saying he/she could not comment on a matter likely to come before the court, etc. It would have been nice if the nominee would have at least commented on past court cases, giving a legal opinion on matters already decided or a hypothetical situation. Why could someone not have given five reasons why Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and was an example of legislating from the bench? It would have been quite enlightening (and foreshadowing of the Dobbs opinion).
The Smell of Fear
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
TBN24, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The idea that only a liberal can freely speak his/her mind during a campaign is nonsense. Conservatives in the post-Dobbs landscape appear to be living in fear of cancellation by the rabid pro-abortion mob. I read a news story after the 2024 elections where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seeking input from constituents of hers who had voted both for her and Donald Trump in the election. She was gob smacked that a supporter of hers would do such a thing and wanted to know their motivation. One theme she heard is that these voters admired the independent and fiery spirit of both politicians. They considered both fighters who would shake things up. It did not occur to the voters that many of the things they intended to “shake up” were complete opposites. Instead, they appreciated someone who would speak his/her mind and not fear the repercussions. Voters can smell fear, so why do we keep getting cowards as candidates?
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