“Wisconsin’s Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Friday fired the conservative former state supreme court justice he hired last year to investigate fraud in the 2020 election, ending a controversial probe that drew bipartisan criticism,” CNN reported on Friday, August 12, 2022 (read story here).
Across the country, Republicans refusing to believe Trump lost the 2020 election have demanded election “audits,” and Arizona and Wisconsin GOP legislators actually conducted — at taxpayer expense — such “audits,” even though they couldn’t change the results.
If Arizona’s “audit” was a sham, Wisconsin’s was a circus, for reasons I wrote about here. Michael Gableman, the “special counsel” appointed to conduct it, has called for decertifying the election, a legal impossibility.
Gableman is a former state supreme court justice, but that doesn’t imply impartiality. Wisconsin state justices are elected by voters, and can be (and sometimes are) partisan hacks. Gableman is in that category; and from the beginning, he was on a crusade to overturn the voters’ will (Biden won Wisconsin).
He’s a crank who found fraud where there was none, embraced debunked conspiracy theories, and was held in contempt by a judge and referred for lawyer discipline after refusing to answer questions in court about his secretive probe into the 2020 election. (Read more about him here.)
But sacking him wasn’t an altruistic act on Vos’s part, or an effort to set things right. It was political retaliation.
Gableman joined Trump in endorsing Vos’s primary opponent, motivated by their anger at Vos’s refusal to decertify the 2020 election, something Vos doesn’t have power to do. Vos barely survived the primary (see story here and results here), and three days later, he terminated Gableman’s appointment and probe of the 2020 election.
Vos isn’t a good guy, but Gableman is a bad guy, and it isn’t a necessarily bad thing for citizens when a bad Republican smacks down a worse Republican, no matter how ignoble the motive behind it is.
Photos: Robin Vos, above; Michael Gableman, lower right