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**Written by Doug Powers

Last year, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed voter ID legislation, which naturally resulted in a lawsuit being filed.

On Tuesday, Dane County Judge David Flanagan issued a temporary injunction against the implementation of the law.

Here’s something the Judge failed to disclose:

Nearly four months before he signed off on the poorly edited order granting a temporary injunction against Wisconsin’s new voter identification law, Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan scribbled his name on another important legal document:

A petition urging the recall of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
[...]
“The very fact that Dane County Judge David Flanagan signed a petition to recall Governor Walker calls (Tuesday’s) court proceedings regarding Wisconsin’s voter ID law into question,” said Republican Party spokesman Ben Sparks in a statement.

Sparks said his party will file a complaint against Flanagan with the state Judicial Commission.

Republicans think that matters — others believe it’s no big deal:

But Michael Maistelman, a Democratic election lawyer, said he doesn’t think it should be a problem that Flanagan signed the recall petition. He noted that Walker and members of the Government Accountability Board are being sued in their official roles, not as political candidates.

So, hypothetically, the above Democrat would have no problem whatsoever if the Supreme Court were to strike down Obamacare even after it was discovered that one of the SCOTUS conservatives had recently signed a petition urging the House to begin impeachment proceedings against the president? That’s hard to believe.

Patterico has more about Judge Flanagan’s ruling, parts of which sound as if they could have been written by Joe Biden on his most gaffe-tastic day:

But, but, it’s not like the judge is just a partisan hack, right? I mean, his ruling is still quality legal scholarship, isn’t it? Replete with careful citations to the applicable laws and sound arguments?

Eh, not so much:

Statehouse staffers spent Tuesday afternoon counting the mistakes in Flanagan’s 11-page order on voter ID.

The most notable is Flanagan’s reference to “Justice William Scalia.” That would be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Several sentences in the decision are garbled.

Flanagan refers to the wrong section of the state Constitution when he says it “sets forth explicitly the requirement for eligibility to vote, Art. I, Sect. 2 (4).”

The article and section cited by Flanagan deals, instead, with the prohibition of slavery. He meant to refer to Article III.

Cullen Werwie, spokesman for the governor, took note of the discrepancies: “Our legal team is still trying to locate Justice William Scalia.”

A person more cynical than I am might say that this is absolute hackery. That it’s abuse of a position to win by any means possible.

And that person would be right.

Why, even William Scalia would agree.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe