WJI's Daily Reads for June 8, 2022

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Chief of Staff Celia Jackson quits Milwaukee City Attorney's Office.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Supreme Court approves release of health department records on businesses' COVID outbreaks.

The data in question, which was requested by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from the state health department in June 2020, is now two years old. The court battle has held up the release of the records for more than a year, a situation which attorneys for the state called "absurd." 

The newspaper filed the records request after meatpacking workers and nursing home residents told reporters that employers had left them in the dark about outbreaks at their facilities, putting them and their families at risk.

WPR: Record number of 4-3 opinions at Wisconsin Supreme Court this term.

While the final numbers could change by the end of the court's term, nearly half of all the court's decisions have been 4-3 this term. By contrast, that number was just 7 percent a decade ago.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Election investigator Michael Gableman attempted to have out-of-state attorney depose Kenosha official.

Most officials rebuffed Gableman, in part because they said he didn’t have the authority to interview them behind closed doors, as he planned.

Kenosha's city administrator, John Morrissey, took a different tack and agreed to appear for a deposition in February in Gableman's office in Brookfield. Morrissey showed up but the interview didn't take place because Gableman planned to have it conducted by an attorney who isn’t licensed to practice law in Wisconsin, according to a transcript of what happened that day.

The Guardian: San Francisco residents recall progressive district attorney.

San Francisco residents have voted to recall the district attorney, Chesa Boudin, who was elected on an agenda of criminal justice reform but faced intensifying backlash from law enforcement, conservatives and residents concerned about crime.

Lawfare: Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision about § 3 of the 14th Amendment could signal problem for Donald Trump.

As I’ll explain later, only two officials appear to be realistically imperiled by Section 3 at the moment. They are an obscure county commissioner in New Mexico, Couy Griffin, and former President Trump.

There is actually a disquietingly strong case at this point that Trump should be disqualified under Section 3 as a factual matter. I say “disquietingly” because the prospect of seeing his name blocked from the ballot in at least some states—though certainly not in others—gives pause in terms of both the violence it might unleash among his followers and the chaos it could bring to the 2024 presidential election.

Still, the prospect of his returning to power, notwithstanding all the evidence of his having incited the Capitol insurrection, is even more disquieting. 

The Washington Post: Lawyers for migrants say government emails show officials held up family reunifications.

“Although the government told the public that family separation was merely a byproduct of a ‘prosecution’ policy, in fact it implemented a far broader policy of separating all families apprehended at the border regardless of whether the parents were prosecuted or even referred for prosecution,” lawyers for the migrants wrote in the court filing Tuesday.

Associated Press: After leak of Supreme Court draft opinion, a call for greater protection of same-sex marriage.

“We should all be worried about our other fundamental rights that have been obtained through the courts over the last decade or so,” said Utah state Sen. Derek Kitchen, a Democrat and the state’s only LGBTQ lawmaker said on the steps of the statehouse on Tuesday.

Kitchen and New Jersey Assemblyman Don Guardian, a Republican, want more states to remove the same-sex marriage bans from their laws and codify rights for LGBTQ couples to prepare for a worst-case scenario in which the Supreme Court decides to overturn the 2015 same-sex marriage decision.