Walker Justice Rebecca Bradley sides with boss, against state Constitution, to make Schools Superintendent subordinate to governor.

The buried headline in the WPR story below is my headline above. We now know how grateful Justice Bradley really is for her 3-year fast tracked journey to a seat on the State Supreme Court.

Even the most conservative Justices couldn’t justify misreading the Constitution, handing ultimate power to Scott Walker.

A Divided Wisconsin Supreme Court Has Overturned Part of a Law That Would Have Given Governors Veto Power Over State Superintendents' Administrative Rules: Walker and Republican legislators passed the law shortly after they came to power in 2011. 

Writing the lead opinion for a divided Supreme Court, Justice Michael Gableman said the law known as 2011 Act 21 gave the state superintendent no way to proceed with rulemaking without the Governor's approval.

"Thus, Act 21 unconstitutionally vests the supervision of public instruction in officers who are not officers of supervision of public instruction," wrote Gableman, one of the court's five conservative justices. Fellow conservative Justice David Prosser also ruled against the law, as did Justices Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley, the court's two liberal members.  

Clarity on Two Recent Supreme Court Changes: Why did Walker want to make Patience Roggensack chief Justice and install constitutional "originalist" Rebecca Bradley on the bench? Because they will be reliable Walker lapdogs. Seriously, ruling against two previous rulings supporting the Superintendent of Public Education constitutional powers...?

Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented.

The court's decision upheld rulings by judges at the circuit court and appeals court levels who sided with the teacher's union members who challenged the law: "In the court's view," wrote Dane County Judge Amy Smith in her 2012 order, "the feature that renders Act 21 unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt is the fact that Act 21 permits the governor, and the (Department of Administration) Secretary under certain circumstances, to stop the superintendent from starting and/or pursuing the process of rulemaking." 

Gableman said that rulemaking was the chief means that the legislature had given the superintendent had to carry out its duty.

Proving once and for all that the words "law" and "liberty" are just marketing tools to appear credible to tea party knuckleheads, the lawsuit mill Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty's Rick Esenberg now knows more than the activist conservative justices he's agreed with so often:

Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel of the conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, who argued before the court in favor of the 2011 law applying to DPI, said Wednesday in a statement that the court's ruling "misapprehends the nature of rule-making and the way in which the Department of Public Instruction actually wields its supervisory authority."