Opinion: Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel reminds us he doesn’t support our freedom

As Scott Walker’s attorney general, Schimel’s record reflects his right-wing priorities.

Most of us agree that our friends and neighbors who teach our kids, take care of us in hospitals and nursing homes, plow our streets, and protect our safety ought to have the freedom to have a say in their working conditions and negotiate fair wages and benefits.

It was disappointing that Brad Schimel, as a candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, characterized this fundamental premise as “madness” in his reaction to a court decision affirming this freedom and declaring the 2011 Act 10 law unconstitutional.  

But it was not surprising. Schimel has a documented record of pandering to right-wing ideologues and the big corporations and special interests that have funded his political ambitions. He’s courting them now to fund his campaign as he unmistakably signals that, given the opportunity, he would continue to put their interests before those of the working people of Wisconsin.

Brad Schimel once wrote that politicians using their elective office to benefit their campaign contributors was, “the essence of representative government.” He put that into practice during his one term as attorney general before being defeated in his re-election bid.

On his second day in office as attorney general, Schimel opened his door to meet with a lobbyist for the gun lobby that supported his election. Two days after that meeting, his office joined a legal effort opposing a gun safety law requiring firearms stored in homes to be locked up.

Others who invested in Schimel’s political campaigns, like the state’s big business lobby also benefitted. For example, in 2016 Schimel took official action to limit Wisconsin’s ability to protect our clean water, setting aside a conflict of interest policy to benefit interests which spent over $2 million on his election.

And when attorneys general across the nation sued the opioid manufacturers whose products addicted millions and ruined countless lives, Brad Schimel did not. Instead, he took Big Pharma’s campaign cash.

Schimel didn’t stop there. He joined the campaign of right-wing ideologues to use the courts to undo the Affordable Care Act, the federal law that is helping Wisconsinites get more affordable health care and protecting consumers from being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or getting dropped by insurers if they get sick.

More recently we learned that Schimel was also using his state office to work with right-wing allies to advance the legal effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court decision that protected abortion access, on top of his support for enforcing a state law from 1849 to ban abortion in Wisconsin.

So in the coming months as Brad Schimel talks about what he will or won’t do, it’s important to remember that Brad Schimel has shown again and again by his actions that it’s his campaign cronies, not our freedom, he’s interested in protecting.

Related: Court ruling restores the public sector union rights stripped away by Act 10