Desperately Seeking Supremacy

Once could be an isolated occurrence. Twice might be a coincidence. Three times starts looking like a pattern. Four must be a strategy.

Republicans in four different states are working right now to bend the legal system to their advantage by weakening or removing popularly elected judges and prosecutors who can’t be relied upon to act in their favor.

In Wisconsin, GOP leaders are plotting to a impeach recently elected state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she hears a single case. Her offense? Doing the same things Republican-backed members of the state’s highest court have been doing for years.

The strategy they are mulling is as clever as it is sinister and goes like this: Republicans use their overwhelming majority gained through partisan gerrymandering to impeach Protasiewicz in the legislature’s lower house. But then the upper house—controlled by a Republican supermajority—does not do its part to remove her, leaving her in office but impeached and thus prohibited unde…