Key Wisconsin GOP Supreme Court justice announces exit, citing bitter political climate

While not announcing her next move, Justice Rebecca Bradley said fellow conservatives need to “take stock of their failures and fix it.”

Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley will not run for reelection next year, citing the “bitter partisanship, personal attacks, and political gamesmanship” that have been hallmarks of numerous disputes among justices — most reliably coming from Bradley herself.

The decision means there will be a wide-open court seat up for grabs come April. Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, a former Democratic legislator, is the only announced candidate for the post. If more than two candidates find their way onto the ballot, there will be a primary in February for the nonpartisan office.  

Since her appointment by Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 (and winning a full 10-year term in 2016), Bradley has been noteworthy for sharp language and personal tones in both her written and spoken remarks.

“For years I have warned that under the control of judicial activists, the court will make itself more powerful than the legislature, more powerful than the governor,” Bradley told WisPolitics. “That warning went unheeded, and Wisconsin has seen only the beginning of what is an alarming shift from thoughtful, principled judicial service toward bitter partisanship, personal attacks, and political gamesmanship that have no place in court.” 

But it was Bradley who voted with other conservatives, then in the majority, to allow Republicans in the Legislature to use a post-election session to weaken the powers of a governor and an attorney general who hadn’t yet been sworn into office. 

Bradley sided with GOP lawmakers, who engaged in a conspiracy to prevent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ appointees from taking their seats in a range of offices and boards. Bradley also supported nullifying Gov. Tony Evers’ efforts to protect lives during the covid pandemic. And she regularly fought to reduce women’s reproductive healthcare rights.

In other overtly political rulings, Bradley voted in 2022 to make ballot drop boxes illegal in Wisconsin while spreading untrue claims about fraud that had no basis in the state’s election history. And in 2020, she was among the conservatives who sided with President Donald Trump’s scheme to have Wisconsin’s presidential results put on hold until they could potentially be invalidated. 

Bradley openly played up her political bias in her statement about not running for another term.

“The conservative movement needs to take stock of its failures, identify the problem, and fix it,” she wrote. It was not immediately clear what Bradley intends to do next to “fix” the conservative movement.

As a Marquette University student in the 1990s, Bradley wrote columns for the student newspaper that bashed gay people, feminism and abortion rights. One column compared abortion to murder, the Holocaust and slavery. In another, she wrote she had no sympathy for AIDS patients.

During her 2016 campaign, Bradley talked up her endorsement by the National Rifle Association and posed in a campaign mailer with a shotgun, orange hunting vest and baseball cap with the NRA logo.