Membership in political parties is no big deal

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Should judges and judicial candidates be allowed to be members of political parties?

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge John Siefert is currently suing the State for the right to be a member of the Democratic Party.

I’m not an expert, but I think he will ultimately win. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In many other states, judges can belong to political parties. As a general matter, I think our judiciary is superior to theirs, and the partisanship of their elections is one reason why.

But those states don’t merely allow their judges to join political parties, and advertise that affiliation in campaign materials. The parties themselves hold primaries, and the general election pits a Democrat versus a Republican.

Even if Siefert wins, we won’t have that here. Wisconsin can still hold nonpartisan elections, with no political affiliation on the ballot.

There is nothing uniquely horrible about political parties that even mere membership in one need be forbidden to all judges and candidates for election to the judiciary (curiously, a lawyer does not need to resign party membership if he applies for appointment to the judiciary in Wisconsin, although he must resign if he gets the appointment).

Consider the two following scenarios:

A member of the Republican party and a member of the Democratic party are running for election to be a judge and they list those affiliations in their campaign materials; and

A member of the Federalist Society and a member of the American Constitution Society are running against each other, and they list those affiliations in their campaign materials.

In the first scenario, the affiliations will have little impact on how I vote; I will vote for whichever candidate I consider more qualified.

In the second scenario, the conflicting affiliations will not be outcome determinative of my vote either; but they will have far more impact than the affiliations in the first.

Assuming, of course, that I consider both candidates to be qualified for the position they seek, I will likely vote based on those affiliations, even if that means voting for the candidate I consider less qualified.

Yet the first scenario is illegal in Wisconsin, while the second is perfectly acceptable.

Maybe some people can make a good argument why the first scenario is worse than the second. But I don’t see how it could be so much more awful that the ban on party membership could survive a First Amendment challenge.