A Dane County judge overstepped her authority when she voided Gov. Scott Walker’s measure limiting public sector collective bargaining, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a fractious 4-3 decision.
In a nine-page decision — followed by about 60 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions — the court’s conservative majority said Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi “usurped the legislative power which the Wisconsin constitution grants exclusively to the Legislature” when she voided the law.
Sumi ruled that a legislative conference committee violated the state’s open meetings law when it hastily met in March to amend the bill, allowing the Republican-controlled Senate to get around a boycott by Senate Democrats.
But in a stinging dissent, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote that the authors of the court’s order — Justices Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, along with concurring Justice David Prosser — lacked “a reasoned, transparent analysis” and incorporate “numerous errors of law and fact.”
The court’s order was met with delight by the Republican majority in the state Legislature.
“We’ve been saying since day one that Republicans passed the budget repair bill correctly, so frankly this isn’t much of a surprise,” state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said. “We followed the law when the bill was passed, simple as that.”
State Sen. Alberta Darling, R- River Hills, said she was “thrilled.”
“We knew we hadn’t done anything wrong,” she said. “Today was a day of justice. Today is a day of victory.”
The court, however, declined to step into the dispute over whether the March 9 conference committee meeting violated the state’s open meetings law, leaving it to the Legislature to set its own rules.
“In the posting of notice that was done, the Legislature relied on its interpretation of its own rules of proceeding,” the court wrote. “The court declines to review the validity of the procedure used to give notice of the joint committee on conference.”

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