On July 16, we saw the definitive end to one of the greatest abuses of power in recent memory. After five years, the Wisconsin supreme court finally halted the Milwaukee district attorney’s notorious “John Doe” investigation that targeted Governor Scott Walker and political allies trying to reform the state’s laws regarding fiscally ruinous public employee unions. Imagine a grand jury investigation but without the jury, leaving a prosecutor who operates secretly—in this case, the district attorney’s investigation was headed by one John Chisholm—with almost sole discretion to pursue whatever evidence he deems relevant to his investigation. (There was nominal supervision from a judge who seems to have exercised no oversight.)
In Wisconsin, Chisholm ordered early morning raids where the cops showed up at political activists’ homes carrying battering rams and subpoenas. The very thin justification for such heavy-handed tactics was, improbably, being accused of violating campaign finance rules that disallow coordination between independent groups and candidates.
Normally, when people work to change a law they disagree with it’s called the democratic process. But in this case, “Chisholm’s wife was a teachers’ union shop steward who was distraught over Act 10’s union reforms,” reported National Review’s David French. “[A former prosecutor] said Chisholm ‘felt it was his personal duty’ to stop them”—legal authority be damned.
According to the Wisconsin supreme court’s ruling halting the investigation—it had previously been put on hold by state and federal courts—“as part of this dragnet, the special prosecutor also had seized wholly irrelevant information, such as retirement income statements, personal financial account information, personal letters, and family photos.” Further, “this conclusion ends the John Doe investigation because the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law.” That bit about the investigation not being founded in “reason” is a remarkable statement coming from a panel of judges. It’s legalese for shouting “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” at the prosecutor.
The court, to its credit, also realizes that there are much bigger issues at stake, given that all this was done in the name of enforcing campaign finance laws. Liberals appalled at the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision have long insisted that there’s no conflict between empowering the government to heavily regulate “political speech” and ensuring that free speech is broadly protected. Wisconsin’s John Doe investigation exposes this for the lie that it is, and the state supreme court is alert to the danger:
The national media were perversely unmoved by the horrors accompanying the John Doe investigation, no doubt because it cast discredit on the motives of unions, campaign finance activists, and other favored groups and distracted from the evil personified by Governor Scott Walker. And so they have largely ignored the appalling abuses.
But the rest of us should not forget the name John Chisholm or the willingness of liberal “good government” crusaders to abandon any respect for basic rights the moment they have an opportunity to go after their enemies.
