Democrats are very fond of claiming “no one is above the law” unless or until it’s one of their own who gets in trouble with the law.
Hannah Dugan is a convicted felon. A federal jury said so in December, after hearing how this then-sitting Milwaukee County judge walked an illegal alien out a side door of her own courtroom because immigration agents had come to arrest him. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in that courtroom on domestic violence charges. The people he was accused of assaulting were sitting there too, waiting for a judge to hear their case. She was busy with something else.
For that felony, which carried up to five years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, slapped her wrist: He sentenced her in July to pay $5,000. No prison. No probation. Not even supervised release.
It gets worse. Last week Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declined to suspend her law license for now, on an expedited basis, even after the state’s own Office of Lawyer Regulation asked them to. Lengthier proceedings are pending, the justices explained. Meantime, she keeps her pension in full. She continues to practice law. Oh, and she is appealing her conviction.
Ask what would happen to anyone else. Ask what would happen to a conservative judge who ran afoul of the law. A union electrician convicted of felony obstruction loses his job, and probably his ability to be bonded. A nurse convicted of a felony loses her license before the appeal is docketed, not after. A CDL driver, a securities broker, a schoolteacher — the licensing board does not wait for the lengthier proceedings. It acts, because a felony conviction is understood everywhere else in American life as a disqualifying event.
Everywhere except inside the left-wing professional class that writes (and enforces) the rules for everyone else.
This is not a sympathetic defendant who made a split-second mistake. This is an officer of the court who used the authority of her bench, in her own building, to undermine a federal arrest warrant. Her defense was that judicial immunity covered it — an argument that, taken seriously, would mean a local judge can obstruct any federal proceeding they disapprove of and answer to no one. A jury rejected it. And while a federal judge appointed by a Democratic president then imposed a penalty, it actually almost served as an endorsement of the act.
And notice what got weighed and what didn’t. Dugan’s career, her decades of service, her reputation — all thoroughly considered. The two victims of Flores-Ruiz were in her courtroom, and they watched the judge help their alleged assailant slip out the back. Where’s their justice? They have merited no institutional attention at all. Nobody is holding hearings about getting them some justice.
There’s one hard limit left, and it’s not because anyone in Madison chose it. The Wisconsin Constitution bars a convicted felon from holding any office of trust, profit, or honor in the state absent a pardon. Because Dugan’s conviction is federal, Democratic Governor Tony Evers cannot issue one, and we know President Trump certainly won’t. So she can never sit as a judge again.
That’s the entire consequence: a rule written in 1848 by people who assumed the institutions of their own day might someday fail to enforce their own standards. They were right.
