WI Justice Rebecca Bradley won the mediocrity medal Tuesday morning

As Covid-19's awful record is written, let's acknowledge that one high-level and highly ignorant analogy made Tuesday in fact has a relevant antecedent.

I watched this morning as rightwing WI Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley in her condemnation of the Evers administration's life-saving Safer-at-Home extension invoked (begin at the 58-minute mark and watch counsel's respectful and instructive shredding of same)



the round-up and imprisonment by US soldiers of Japanese-American citizens during WW II.

Behind barbed wire. And military guard towers. Stripped of their possessions, businesses, land, dignity and rights. 

Rebecca Bradley also said the emergency order to minimize the pandemic's deadly spread issued by WI Health and Human Services Secretary Andrea Palm was "the very definition of tyranny" because it imprisoned [sic] people in their homes.

Her painfully limited 'argument' reminded me of then-GOP US Sen. Roman Hruska's memorable defense of a rejected Richard Nixon Supreme Court nominee who'd been labeled "mediocre."

"Even if he [Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos."

Then I came to my senses, realizing that given her persistent analytical deficits, lumping in Rebecca Bradley with the mediocre - and, by the way, thank you, Gov. Walker, for originally citing her "integrity" and in rapid succession putting her on the Court and two others - did them an incredible disservice:

Rebecca Bradley called gay people 'degenerates,' 'queers' in college newspaper columns

Note also that the decline of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is an intentional consequence of its eager subservience to ideological advocacy organizations and monied special interests. 

And while I have been predicting since last week that the Court will undo Evers' authority and upend his administration's emergency powers and order - and I pray I'm wrong:

...we're told that GOP leaders, along with WI's big-business-without-any-worker-representation' special interests are working on a plan to roll out should they when the State Supreme Court lets them wrest control of the government's emergency powers from Gov. Evers.

The only thing that might deter the Court would be an unwillingness to own - along with the Evers-Fitzgerald partisan crowd - the rest of the Covid-19 infection rate and death toll.

On the other, the court's conservatives were willing to force citizens to vote in-person as the pandemic was striking down people in Milwaukee and statewide -

52 who worked or voted in Wisconsin election have COVID-19

- so playing Russian roulette with public health and people's personal survival would be nothing new to the Wisconsin high court's majority.