Wisconsin residents began flocking to bars and restaurants following a state Supreme Court ruling that struck down its stay-at-home order and gathering restrictions. Arguing the state’s case, Assistant Attorney General Colin Roth warned against the consequences of such a ruling, particularly in consideration of the lack of a replacement plan. According to USA Today, Roth told the Court that “if safer-at-home (order) is enjoined with nothing to replace it, and people pour out into the streets, then the disease will spread like wildfire and we’ll be back in a terrible situation with an out-of-control virus with no weapon to fight it — no treatments, no vaccine, nothing.”
USA Today reported that the Republican lawmakers who brought the suit had requested in advance for a favorable ruling to be stayed to give officials time to develop an alternate plan to manage the Covid-19 threat without the order in place. The justices did not stay the ruling, and the duty to develop a new plan fell to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers.
The 4-3 decision included the dissent of one of the Court’s five conservative justices. At issue was whether Governor Evers, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, overstepped his legal authority by directly issuing the state’s covid-19 restrictions rather than using the rulemaking process, which would have allowed the legislature to block them. Dissenting conservative justice Brian Hagedorn characterized the decision as “one of the most blatant examples of judicial activism in [the] court’s history,” according to USA Today. Hagedorn, who once worked for former Republican governor Scott Walker, was quoted thusly by USA Today: “the legislature may have buyer’s remorse for the breadth of discretion it gave to (the Department of Health Services). But those are the laws it drafted; we must read them faithfully whether we like them or not.”