Gov. Scott Walker used his office to give one candidate in the state Supreme Court race, Rebecca Bradley, the instantaneous power of incumbency the other day – no small thing in court races.

I don’t criticize him for doing so; there’s precedent, and it’s well within his right to use the power of his office to try to shape the court. If you don’t agree with that, then don’t give the executive branch appointment powers. He has it. He’d be silly not to use it.

I also find Bradley to be an impressive person. She’s smart, competent and definitely an up-and-comer. 

That all being said, I think that voters should give a closer look to another candidate in the race, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Joe Donald. Instant incumbent or not, I think it’s important that the race continue on as planned before the untimely death of long-time incumbent Pat Crooks. We should have a race in which the resumes and records of all of the candidates are thoroughly scrutinized and debated.

In other words, this election should be no sure thing. I also think it’s impossible to argue, when you stack their resumes side-by-side, that Donald – a judge for 20 years with distinction, elected four times – is less qualified than Bradley, a judge for about three years, elected once and appointed thrice. Furthermore, Donald, as an African-American jurist, would provide needed diversity to the state’s highest court.

The state Supreme Court is incredibly diverse in a gender sense; with a 5-2 female tilt, it might actually be more female-dominated than any other state highest court. However, it has zero ethnic minorities. This is just embarrassing. And, yes, it matters. Those who argue that race shouldn’t matter and that only qualifications should are basically arguing that there are no qualified minorities to serve on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Which isn’t true. Donald is a prime example of a qualified candidate – a more qualified candidate than the new incumbent by many measures. And he’s still running; in fact, he’d raised $100,000 in the race by late July.

When he appointed Bradley to the position, Walker urged voters to assess Bradley on her own merits, arguing that she was the best qualified candidate out there (Donald didn’t seek the appointment, probably because everyone knew Bradley was the candidate du jour).

Once you start assessing qualifications, though, if you’re honest, you can only argue Bradley’s the most qualified if you look at this all through a strictly ideological lens and maybe not even then (the wink-and-nod in Bradley’s resume is her Federalist Society leadership and personal Walker donations. That’s all most conservatives need to think she’s one of them). However, I thought our courts were not supposed to be driven by ideology or partisanship (yeah, I’m not naïve enough to think they aren’t, and that happens both ways. Those upset about conservative partisanship can’t possibly believe Shirley Abrahamson doesn’t have a partisan take, right? Yet, Bradley is running on a platform of strict adherence to the law, but I hear supporters backing her because they think she’s a conservative who favors their causes. Incongruent?)

Predictably, liberal candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg trashed Walker’s appointment, saying the public deserves a "people’s" candidate, not a political appointment. But here’s the thing. Most people would also regard Kloppenburg as ideological, a stalking horse of the left determined to use the courts to roll back Walker reforms. Yes, she’s qualified – an appeals court judge and so on – but I wouldn’t consider voting for her because she strikes me as too political.

I personally don’t want a wild-eyed Abrahamson type on the court who’s a flame thrower for the left. Not sure I want another Scalia though, either. I’m thinking more along the lines of Anthony Kennedy, someone who seems to carefully apply the law and can’t be easily predicted. Or Pat Crooks.

Then there’s Joe Donald in door No. 3, the Milwaukee County judge of almost 20 years who has served in many divisions, most recently felonies. I find him to be a very interesting candidate who’s not as easy to peg. He was appointed to the bench by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, after all.

However, he has enough ties to Democrats to give Republicans heartburn; he’s been endorsed by former Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl, and appears to be particularly beloved by trial attorneys and once endorsed Ann Walsh Bradley. 

Still, should we really be looking at higher court races strictly through a game of pin the "partisan" donkey (or elephant) on each candidate? Isn’t that part of the problem? Or should we look at candidates holistically, considering resumes, life experiences, intellectual heft and achievements? I think the partisanship frame through which our court is seen causes dysfunction and loss of credibility. 

When looking at resumes, Donald fares very well. He helped create and served as the first presiding judge over the Milwaukee County drug court and has served on a variety of community boards from Probation and Parole to Milwaukee Area Technical College.

He is trying to position himself as an independent; of course, this is a common refrain from liberal judges who really mean they won’t be conservative, and it’s a little suspect coming from a guy who endorsed Walsh Bradley, who slings partisan mud with glee. 

However, Donald enjoys a respected reputation on the Milwaukee bench. He’s deeply involved in the community. People who know his work tell me he’s probably a moderate, an independent and widely considered a good judge. That they’re not 100 percent sure is probably good.

Walker had to have known that the left would try to tie his appointment around the neck of any appointee like an albatross. They did this in the Prosser/Kloppenburg race too, but making that court race a proxy Walker war didn’t work because the governor was still popular. Furthermore, the tilt of the court was hanging in the balance along with Act 10, so big money flowed in. 

This race isn’t going to change the tilt of the court, so less money might be forthcoming. Walker is also a weaker governor, and Rebecca Bradley is not a jurist with a breadth of judicial experience like Prosser was (although she isn’t saddled with the controversies he was either). In those ways, the Bradley appointment looks less shrewd.

It’s obvious that Walker is hoping to engineer what he did in 2012, when he appointed Bradley to the Milwaukee bench a couple months before the election. She was then re-elected by voters with 54 percent of the vote in a race fueled by heavy spending by the Club for Growth. 

Her opponent was a Democratic prosecutor who tried to tag her as a Walker appointee but couldn’t beat back the spending or her support. In fairness, Bradley has an interesting mix of supporters; liked by law enforcement, her appeals court investiture included diverse people ranging from Milwaukee talk show host Eric Von (no conservative) to Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (no liberal). In some ways, she reminds me of Diane Sykes. 

But Sykes had been a Milwaukee judge seven years before she rose to the highest court, serving in many different divisions. Bradley was a judge about two and a half years, serving in Children’s Court. As with Donald, she’s been involved in the community. I personally don’t see it as a plus or minus that she was a leader in the Federalist Society. I look at her resume in totality. 

With all that being said, if Walker was going to appoint, you’d think he’d pick a distinguished jurist with unquestionable breadth of experience on the bench, if for no other reason but to ward off inevitable attacks. Someone with gravitas.

Instead, the governor appointed Bradley for the third time since 2012. A three-time Walker appointee who has only been a judge since December 2012? It’s going to raise questions. Bradley spent a number of years working for private law firms and a software company in areas like medical malpractice and intellectual property litigation, but her dizzying ride of appointments leaves the open question of whether she’s paid judicial dues. Was she the best person out there, really? Even on the right?

Appointed by Walker to the Milwaukee bench in 2012, she was appointed by him to the Court of Appeals in May of 2015 and now appointed by him to the State Supreme Court this month. That’s three appointments in three years, hardly enough time to build a judicial record so we don't really have any idea really how she’d perform (no big decisions authored, etc.). One wonders whether she should have spent a little more than six months on the Court of Appeals. 

That doesn’t make her unqualified to sit on the court. After all, David Prosser was a legislator before he did, and judicial experience is not a requirement. But it’s nice to have some sense of how a judge’s reasoning might go, and their degree of intellectual heft when writing appellate decisions. Whether it’s John Roberts or David Souter, there are plenty of examples of relatively unknown (at the time) judges who didn’t decide things how people thought they might.

Donald has been a judge for a long time, so now is the time for the media to do its job and start poring through the known record of his cases. I am not making an outright endorsement in this race. I’d like to know more about each candidate and see how they hold up under campaign scrutiny. Unfortunately, with Bradley, there’s little record to paw through.

Even though there’s now an instant incumbent, voters should give Joe Donald a very close look. Let’s have a vigorous race. Maybe Bradley shakes out in the end as the best, but that’s not self-evident.