Free Republic

The Wisconsin state Senate has just paved the way for the state Supreme Court to elect its own chief justice—and the conservatives’ pick might shake up the governor’s own case. Eighty-one-year-old Shirley Abrahamson has been chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for 18 years, but that tenure looks like it’s about to come to an abrupt end. A state constitutional amendment, passed Tuesday in the state Senate 17-14 along strict party lines, will allow the court’s seven justices to vote on a chief justice, undoing a 126-year-old tradition that grants the post to the longest-serving justice on the bench....