Wisconsin Anti-Due Process Bill Is Unhinged

Update: Bizarre Republican amendment would still cut out appellate deliberation, but would allow clerical paperwork by appellate courts, (WisPolitics). Equal Protection and Due Process problems remain.
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Madison, Wisconsin — Suppose you and friends in the legislature know someone from Taiwan and henceforth you would like $3 billion in public subsidies lavished onto your comrade.

Crazy, but legal.

But so enthralled are you with your Taiwanese friend, you propose special legal status of a class-caste power of privilege that would have made C. Wright Mills recoil in surprise.

And laws protecting the people and Wisconsin communities? Forget it, you say.

Equal playing-field in the marketplace. Cute.

The Wisconsin Republican-Peter Barca project in service to Foxconn Technology Co Ltd, aka Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd., now proposes perverse and privileged legal status for this single corporate actor along the lines described above.

Putting aside the fiscal and macro-economic cat-five disasters being courted, not much objection is voiced publicly from Wisconsin on the proposed abandonment of settled Equal Protection and Due Process doctrine, and state Judicial power and discretion establishing guarantees under which all litigants are equal in the eyes of the Judicial branch.

Notes Matt Rothschild:

When the Joint Finance Committee voted, along party lines, to give Foxconn the right to directly appeal any lower court order straight to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and to have that order suspended until the high court rules on it, the legislature was entering very dubious legal waters.

First of all, there is a separation of powers problem. The legislature is letting Foxconn skip the entire appellate court process. Where does the legislature get off telling the judiciary how it will function?

Secondly, there is an equal protection problem. Why should other businesses, or individuals, have to go through the potentially costly appellate process when Foxconn doesn’t have to? And why can only Foxconn get an instant and automatic stay on any lower court’s decision when every other party in the lower courts has to ask a judge for a stay?

The reason why the Joint Finance Committee carved out the exception for Foxconn is pretty obvious: The Wisconsin Supreme Court is reliably in the hands of a conservative and business-friendly majority.

This judicial exemption that the GOP-dominated Joint Finance Committee has carved out for Foxconn puts in sharp relief the utter corporatization of Wisconsin politics.

We don’t have a democracy in Wisconsin today. We have corporate rule.

That this abandonment of equality before the law is openly mused is an embarrassment for Wisconsin, much less seriously proposed in the Wisconsin Legislature's 2017 Special Session, Assembly Bill 1.

I doubt this anti-Constitutional legislative initiative will be included in the final Foxconn bill.

Yet, so unhinged and uneducated about Constitutional protections are Republicans and a couple of Democratic Party bed-fellows that this latest proposal could ring unfair and unjust around the state and become a political scandal, if only the Wisconsin Dems will begin strategic communications to this effect.

In any event, federal litigation will predictably commence with Gov. Scott Walker signing this legislation into law, so what Walker and Republicans are doing is betting they can present this madness as productive public policy better than critics can point out its numerous defects.