Voter ID laws are popular among conservative lawmakers because they disproportionately disenfranchise poor, student and minority voters, all of which are typically more left-of-center than the average voter. They also violate the federal Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on state laws that discriminate against minority voters.

According to Wisconsin Judge David Flanagan, they violate the Wisconsin Constitution too. In an order issued yesterday, Flanagan temporarily suspended his state’s voter ID law and strongly hinted that he will eventually strike the law down permanently.

As Flanagan’s opinion explains, the Wisconsin Constitution provides particularly strong protections for the right to vote — “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district,” regardless of whether or not they have an ID. Moreover, the state supreme court has interpreted this constitutional provision very robustly. “Voting is a constitutional right,” according to the Wisconsin supremes, “any statute that denies a qualified elector the right to vote is unconstitutional and void.”

Flanagan accordingly subjects the law to the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and finds it deeply lacking. As he explains, the law disenfranchises voters, sometimes in absurd ways, and targets a problem that is only slightly more real than fairies and unicorns:

[F]orty uncontested affidavits offer a picture of carousel visits to government offices, delay, dysfunctional computer systems, misinformation and significant investment of time to avoid being turned away at the ballot box. This is burdensome, all the more for the elderly and the disabled. . . . Mr. Ricky Tyrone Lewis is 58 years old, a Marine Corps Veteran and a lifelong Milwaukee resident. He was able to offer proof of his honorable discharge but Milwaukee County has been unable to find the record of his birth so he cannot obtain a voter ID card. Ms. Ruthelle Frank, now 84, is a lifelong resident of Brokaw, Wisconsin and a member of her town board since 1996. She has voted in every election over the past 64 years but she does not have a voter ID card. She located her birth certificate but found that her name was misspelled. She was advised to obtain a certified copy of the incorrect birth certificate and try to use that to obtain a voter ID card. . . .

The plaintiffs do not dispute, and the court certainly accepts fully the value of maintaining the accuracy and security of the ballot process. At this point, however, the record is uncontested that recent investigations of vote irregularities, both in the City of Milwaukee and by the Attorney General have produced extremely little evidence of fraud and that which has been uncovered, improper use of absentee ballots and unqualified voters, would not have been prevented by the photo identification requirements of Act 23.

Unfortunately, however, Flanagan’s decision will ultimately appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, whose current members have a long history of handing down ideologically conservative 4-3 decisions.

In just three short years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, conservative Justice Michael Gableman managed to embroil himself in two major ethics scandals. The first, which arose before he was even elected to the court, arose out of a false ad Gableman ran during his election campaign claiming that his opponent unleashed a child molester on society. This ad led to an official ethics complaint from the state Judicial Commission, although the ethics case was eventually dropped after Gableman’s six colleagues on the state’s highest court split 3-3 along party lines on whether Gableman committed misconduct.

In order to defend himself against this ethics complaint, Gableman received tens of thousands of dollars in free legal fees from a law firm that frequently litigates in front of his court. Yet Gableman has continued to sit on cases brought by that firm — even casting the deciding vote allowing Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attack on collective bargaining to go into effect.

In response to these two incidents, a member of the state legislature has now introduced a resolution calling for Gableman to be removed from the bench:

A Democratic state lawmaker circulated a resolution Wednesday calling for the ouster of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman because he presided over cases involving a law firm that had represented him without charging legal fees.

State Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, an attorney who is also running for Congress for the district covering the city of Madison, asked her colleagues to sign on to the resolution by Jan. 18. The state constitution allows for the Legislature to remove a judge from office with a two-thirds majority vote in both the Senate and Assembly.

Although Roys’ resolution is very unlikely to receive the two-thirds majority it requires in the GOP-controlled state legislature, Wisconsin’s voters are not powerless if they agree with Roys that Gableman’s actions go too far. Because Gableman has served more than a year of his current term in elected office, Wisconsin election law allows him to be recalled.

Last week, news broke that conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman received tens of thousands of dollars worth of free legal services from a law firm defending him against charges that he ran a deceptive campaign ad in violation of state ethics law. Wisconsin judicial ethics laws prohibits judges from receiving gifts of any kind from someone who is likely to appear before them.

Nevertheless, Gableman did not simply accept these services from a law firm that frequently appears before his court, he cast the key vote in two cases argued by that law firm — including the single most contentious case heard by the state supreme court this year:

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in two cases cast the deciding vote in favor of parties represented by a law firm that gave him tens of thousands of dollars of free legal services, a review of state records shows.

One of those was a high-stakes case this June that allowed Gov. Scott Walker to implement a law that all but eliminates collective bargaining for most public workers. Gableman was in the 4-3 majority that allowed Walker to prevail. Michael Best & Friedrich – the firm that defended Gableman for free in an ethics case – worked for the state and Walker’s administration in the collective bargaining case. [...]

Since the firm started representing Gableman in the ethics case in July 2008, Gableman has participated in nine cases in which the court voted on substantive issues involving Michael Best clients. Gableman ruled in those clients’ favor in five of those cases – more than any other justice.

Gableman joined the state supreme court in 2008 after corporate lobbyists and other right-wing groups spent $1.3 million to elect him to his current job. Wisconsin voters are far from powerless against Gableman’s casual approach to judicial ethics, however. Because Gableman has served more than a year of his current term in elected office, Wisconsin election law allows him to be recalled.

In 2008, a conservative judge named Michael Gableman narrowly defeated incumbent Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler thanks to nearly $1.3 million in spending from right-wing interest groups and a false ad claiming that Butler unleashed a child molester upon society. This ad later became the subject of an ethics inquiry into Justice Gableman — Wisconsin law forbids judicial candidates from lying about their opponents — although the ethics case was dropped after the six remaining justices split 3-3 along party lines on whether Gableman committed misconduct.

A newly released letter, however, suggests that Gableman managed to violate ethics laws in hiring legal counsel to defend him against these allegations that he violated ethics laws:

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman received free legal service worth thousands of dollars from one of Wisconsin’s largest law firms as it defended him against an ethics charge, according to a letter released Thursday by the firm.

The state’s ethics code says state officials cannot receive anything of value for free because of their position. And a separate ethics code specifically for judges says they cannot accept gifts from anyone who is likely to appear before them.

A former state ethics official on Thursday said authorities should thoroughly investigate how the deal between Gableman and attorney Eric McLeod of Michael Best & Friedrich worked because Gableman did not end up paying any attorneys fees. [...]

Michael Best has five cases currently before the Supreme Court. Gableman is participating in all of them. Gableman did not respond Thursday to a request for an interview.

Sadly, this is hardly the only ethical tangle to emerge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court since Gableman’s election allowed conservatives to seize control over it. With Gableman casting the key fourth vote, the court’s conservatives voted to allow corporate lobbyists to write the court’s ethics rule enabling justices to sit on cases involving their major campaign donors.

Earlier this year, after Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser’s razor-thin reelection victory led to a recount, Prosser hired an attorney named Jim Troupis to represent him in the recount proceedings. Now, less than three months after that recount ended, Troupis is set to argue a campaign finance case brought by various Tea Party groups before Prosser’s court, and Prosser’s former campaign director says that Justice Prosser will hear the case.

As it turns out, Prosser’s participation in this Tea Party case raises very serious ethical questions:

“A lawyer-client relationship is one of the highest fiduciary relationships,” said professor Monroe Freedman, a professor at Hofstra Law School in New York. “The judge has put his trust and confidence in this lawyer in retaining him. The fact that the judge has had this kind of extremely close relationship with this lawyer – a relationship built on dependency and trust – in the recent past is something that might well cause a reasonable person to question the judge’s ability to be impartial.

“Ordinarily a judge listens to each lawyer, giving each lawyer the weight the argument is entitled to without having a thumb on the scale. . . . (This relationship) is one of those thumbs on the scale.”

Another expert on legal ethics, New York University School of Law professor Stephen Gillers, said Prosser shouldn’t hear the case because Troupis’ work was so important to keeping Prosser on the bench and because it occurred so recently. He said legal scholars may differ on the issue, but the argument for recusal is strong.

“I think under the rules on disqualification, Justice Prosser should step aside now,” Gillers said.

Agreeing was Charles Geyh, a professor at the Maurer Law School at Indiana University Bloomington.

“It’s a bad idea” to stay on the case, he said. “The perception is you would act to do your own attorney a good turn.“

Of course, if Prosser does not recuse himself from the Tea Party case, it will hardly be the first time he undermined Wisconsin litigants’ ability to receive justice free from the taint of potential conflicts of interest. Prosser cast the key vote rejecting an ethics rule that would have prevented him and his colleagues from hearing cases involving their major campaign donors. Instead, he enacted an ethics rule written by corporate lobbyists. Those same lobbyists later showed their support for Prosser by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in “unlimited and undisclosed” funds to keep Prosser on the state supreme court.

Prosser is also the subject of a special prosecutor’s investigation into whether he seized fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley by the neck and placed her in a chokehold.