Yesterday, Wisconsin held its presidential primary. As a result, Sen. Bernie Sanders gained a net of 11 delegates on his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He now trails her by a total of 252 pledged delegates. Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz gained a net of 30 delegates on his closest Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Cruz now trails Trump by a total of 226 delegates.
In total, Sanders’ net gain over Clinton amounts to less than one-half of one percent of the total delegates he would need to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Cruz’s net gain over Trump amounts to just over 2 percent of what he needs to win his party’s nomination.
As Wisconsin voted to nudge Sanders and Cruz ever so slightly closer to the delegate counts they would need to become presidential nominees, they also cast ballots in a much more decisive election. Rebecca Bradley, a conservative jurist that Gov. Scott Walker (R) temporarily appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to fill a vacancy opened up by the death of her predecessor, won election to that same court. She now gains a much longer term on a court frequently mired in the partisan politics of the state.
Democrats hoped to topple Bradley, especially after a raft of toxic columns the future jurist published as an undergraduate came to light last month. In at least one of those columns, Bradley expressed views about homosexuality that border on genocidal. “The homosexuals and drug addicts who do essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior deservedly receive none of my sympathy,” Bradley wrote in 1992. In another column, she claimed that AIDS research received too much funding relative to other ailments such as cancer. “How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments.”
“Heterosexual sex is very healthy in a loving martial relationship,” according to the younger Bradley. “Homosexual sex, however, kills.”
Often, the opinions someone held in college offer little insight into their views as a much older professional. But Bradley’s more recent writings suggest that she continues to hold very unusual views about human sexuality. In a 2006 column published in the defunct publication MKE, Bradley likened many forms of birth control to murder.
That column concerned proposed legislation that would have permitted pharmacists with religious objections to contraception to refuse to dispense the drugs they find objectionable. “Proponents of ‘choice’ oppose” such laws, Bradley wrote, “because they interfere with the elevation of women’s convenience over pharmacists’ objections to being a party to murder.”
This column appears to be rooted in the belief, rejected by numerous medical organizations, that many common forms of birth control are akin to abortion. “The law,” Bradley concluded in the same column, “certainly should protect pharmacists who choose not to be a party to the morally abhorrent termination of life.”
Bradley most likely benefited from the unusual timing of this election. Approximately 100,000 more voters cast ballots in the state’s Republican primary — a disparity that is probably attributable to the fact that the eventual outcome of the Republican nominating contest is more uncertain than the outcome of the Democratic race. Similarly, with about 98 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, Bradley’s margin over her opponent, Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg, was just under 100,000 votes.
Justice Bradley’s victory keeps her on a court that has been a close ally to Gov. Walker and an instrumental player in the Wisconsin Republican Party’s efforts to make it harder to vote. Among other things, the state supreme court upheld the state’s voter ID law, a common method of voter suppression, before Bradley joined it.
Now, Bradley has won a ten-year term on her state’s highest court.