Candidate Dan Kelly calls opponent in Supreme Court “dishonest”

Dishonest and slanderous. Those are two of the words that Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly used Monday on WIZM’s La Crosse Talk to describe the campaign of his spring election opponent, Janet Protasiewicz. 

The two candidates emerged from a field of four in the February primary to reach the general election for a 10-year term.

“It is a contemptible campaign that my opponent is running,” Kelly told host Mike Hayes. “It is truly beneath contempt. It’s bad enough for a jurist to run garbage like that. It’s even beneath the dignity of a politician, and that’s setting a pretty low bar.”

Ads run by Protasiewicz since the primary claim Kelly has defended child sex predators, and call him an extremist.  

Kelly was appointed to an open seat on the Supreme Court by former Gov. Scott Walker in 2016, and served for four years until losing in the 2020 election.

He said one reason he’s running again this year is because he supports the rule of law, and citizens saw that in him.

“So many of them asked me to run that I seriously considered it, and eventually decided to,” Kelly says. “And the other reason is, I thoroughly enjoyed serving the people of Wisconsin in that role.”

Conservative Kelly charges that liberal Protasiewicz believes in the “rule of Janet,” and wants to be the deciding vote in close cases before the court.  Experts say the April election will tip the court to the left or the right, depending on who wins.

Besides speaking on WIZM, Kelly visited La Crosse on Monday to speak at the annual dinner of the La Crosse Chamber of Commerce.