The Wisconsin Supreme Court has appointed two three-judge circuit court panels to hear lawsuits challenging the state’s Republican-favoring congressional map. A conservative justice’s dissent defending the existing districts relied on a mischaracterization of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Elections Clause.
On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which currently has a 4–3 liberal majority, ordered that two lawsuits over the state’s congressional map be heard by separate three-judge circuit court panels, as required by a 2011 state law.
The cases challenge the congressional boundaries first adopted in 2011, when Republicans controlled state government, and later preserved with only modest changes after the 2020 census. Although Wisconsin is closely divided politically, Republicans now hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats under the current map.
In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler argued that state courts should have little or no role in policing congressional redistricting under the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause, contending that redistricting authority rests primarily with the Legislature. To bolster that view, she invoked the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Moore v. Harper, portraying it as sharply limiting the role of state courts in reviewing congressional maps.
According to Slate’s account of Ziegler’s original dissent, she described the role of state courts in congressional redistricting as “exceedingly limited” and placed that phrase in quotation marks as if it appeared in Moore v. Harper. In fact, that exact phrase does not appear in the Moore majority opinion, which rejected a broad version of the independent state legislature theory and held that the Elections Clause “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.” Instead, language about an “exceedingly limited” federal role in reviewing state-court interpretations of their own constitutions appears in outside commentary on the case, not in the decision itself.
After the apparent misquote was flagged publicly, the Wisconsin Supreme Court withdrew Ziegler’s opinion and issued a revised version. The updated dissent removed quotation marks around the phrase but continued to paraphrase Moore v. Harper as significantly constraining state court oversight of federal-election laws.
Ziegler, joined in dissent by fellow conservative Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, accused the liberal majority of engaging in partisan maneuvering. In language echoed across several outlets, she wrote that the majority was “hand picking circuit court judges to perform political maneuvering … all in furtherance of delivering partisan, political advantage to the Democratic Party.”
The two lawsuits were filed by separate groups of plaintiffs: one by a bipartisan coalition of business leaders and another on behalf of voters by the liberal-aligned Elias Law Group. Both suits contend that the current configuration of districts is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that entrenches Republican control. If the plaintiffs prevail and the lines are redrawn, Democrats hope to make at least two of the six Republican-held seats more competitive ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, according to public statements from the legal teams and redistricting advocates.
The court’s order creating the panels did not resolve those underlying claims or address whether new maps must be in place before the next election. The court also has not publicly explained how the misquotation in Ziegler’s original dissent occurred or why the error was corrected without altering her broader reading of Moore v. Harper.
