Stuart Taylor, Jr.
American Media Institute
via Legal NewsLine
9/9/2014
CHICAGO – The future of the Wisconsin’s governor’s race could hang on a federal appeals court in Chicago hearing a potentially explosive case today.
Depending on how the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decides, the ruling will have major impact on the scope of political speech, the role of voter’s donations in politics, and the fate of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a 2016 Republican presidential hopeful.
The governor’s race is virtually tied, according to recent polls, and the court’s ruling may move undecided voters. The investigation, critics say, has paralyzed conservative advocacy in Wisconsin, giving an advantage to unions when Gov. Walker is locked in a tight re-election race against Democrat Mary Burke.
Gov. Walker, a Republican, is at the center of a sweeping and secretive four-year criminal investigation by Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, and other prosecutors, that is now focused on alleged “illegal coordination” of campaign funding by the governor and 29 independent nonprofits — virtually the entire conservative movement in Wisconsin…
…Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”
Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.
Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that “he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.”
Chisholm was referring to Gov. Walker’s proposal – passed by the legislature in March 2011 – to require public employee unions to contribute to their retirement and health-care plans for the first time and to limit unions’ ability to bargain for non-wage benefits…
The entire article is at Legal Newsline.
