Today’s lengthy and contentious 4-2 ruling dividing the Court on partisan/ideological lines, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court ending the so-called “John Doe” probe, is significant for three reasons: (1) it removes a cloud from the Scott Walker presidential campaign; (2) it guts, perhaps for years, the effectiveness of the state of Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws, and (3) it reenforces conservative beliefs that they are the victims of frightening harassment, a belief which is likely to lead conservative judges to strike more campaign laws. The case also raises significant questions about judicial recusal which go unanswered, and provide one of two potential bases to seek U.S. Supreme Court review in this case. Still, high court review seems unlikely.

I will not spend any time on the effects of the case on the Scott Walker candidacy, as this is an obvious benefit.

Nor will I review the background of this convoluted set of cases. For more, see my earlier Slate piece, as well as early coverage of today’s ruling in the NY Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Wisconsin State Journal. So let me focus on the remaining two points, and the potential for Court review.

Gutting of campaign finance. The conservatives on the Court have held that Wisconsin’s existing campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment to the extent they limit coordination between a candidate and any group, even a 501c4 group not disclosing its donors, on campaigns to support that candidate. The only thing the nominally outside group has to do is to avoid words of express advocacy or their functional equivalent. Avoiding express advocacy while vigorously supporting a candidate, as we know from the federal period before McCain-Feingold, is child’s play. That is, a candidate can now direct unlimited contributions to a nominally outside group and tell that group what ads to run, when, and how. If you think it is a problem for someone to be able to give millions of dollars directly to a candidate to support that candidate’s campaign, then this should be very troubling to you. It was a theory of coordination strongly rejected by the 7th Circuit in the federal version of the John Doe case. And there’s no prospect that the Wisconsin legislature, dominated by Republicans and already weakening campaign finance law, will fix this. This applies only to Wisconsin elections (and not federal elections in Wisconsin) but is very, very bad news. (More analysis in my earlier Slate piece.)

Conservative harassment. For months, conservatives have been sending me stories for ELB purporting to show the horrors of the investigation (late night raids, etc.) However, these stories were never fully verified. As the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel editorialized about the selling of this story: “A breathless article in the conservative National Review. An equally breathless report by Megyn Kelly on Fox News. Tart comments from Gov. Scott Walker on the campaign trail in Iowa…. onservatives targeted by the John Doe investigation for more than a year have declined to discuss their concerns with the Journal Sentinel or other independent news outlets that will seek out all sides to a story. They have told their stories only to partisan outlets that share their political agenda, such as Fox News, the National Review and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page (not its news staff).” Now the conservatives on the Supreme Court have validated this version of events, and without full transparency the stories cannot be fully investigated. One Justice even went so far as to reach the issue of the constitutionality of the nighttime raids even though the issue was not before the Court. (I would love that Justice to ride along with police in the poorer parts of Milwaukee at night and perhaps gain some appreciation of what others face from law enforcement every day.) In the meantime, they fit into a conservative meme of persecution for conservative ideas. Expect this to lead to calls for even more laws to be struck down out of fear of persecution, fears which generally do not stand up to scrutiny.

Recusal? We know that one of the prosecutors in the case asked at least one of the Justices who decided the case to recuse because the Justice may have been supported by some of the campaign spending in the case. As the dissenting Justice Abrahamson notes, the majority did not even respond to the issue. It seems to me that this at least deserves a response as to why recusal is not warranted.

U.S. Supreme Court review? The dissent notes that under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Caperton decision, the failure to recuse in this case could be a due process violation. At least theoretically, that’s an issue which could go to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court could also potentially consider the First Amendment holding about coordinated issue advocacy. My guess is that the Court will decline review in this case, and frankly, given this Supreme Court on campaign finance issues, I’d be very afraid of having this issue before this Supreme Court. I mean I think Justice Kennedy would consider coordinated issue advocacy to be regulable, but I don’t know that I’d be the entire country’s campaign finance system on it.

In all, this is an unsurprising partisan holding on a partisan court about a campaign finance investigation with partisan implications. (True, Justice Crooks who dissented campaigned as a conservative, but started as a Democrat. So I guess there’s that to argue this is not fully a partisan decision.) The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been among the most bitterly divided along partisan lines. I doubt that after this they will move on. This will just further entrench things. A bad day for campaign finance, and a worse day for Wisconsin.

[This post has been updated and edited.]