MADISON, Wis. – A campaign finance report filed this week shows that Judge Maria Lazar’s campaign for Wisconsin Supreme Court recently received over $1,000 from Misha Tseytlin, an out-of-state right-wing lawyer who played a key role in the plot to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Just a few months ago, Maria Lazar said that overturning Roe v. Wade was ‘very wise,’ and now the anti-abortion extremists who orchestrated it are rewarding her,” said Lucy Ripp, communications director at A Better Wisconsin Together.
Reporting from The New York Times Magazine shows that Tseytlin was intimately involved in plans to overturn abortion rights in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election.
According to the Times’ reporting, at a 2016 gathering sponsored by The Federalist Society and right-wing court puppet master Leonard Leo, “There was no reason to think overturning Roe was impossible now, Tseytlin believed … And Tseytlin had an idea of how to do just that.”
Tseytlin’s donation to Lazar’s campaign comes as Lazar has been desperately trying to backtrack on public statements and hide her anti-abortion record from Wisconsinites.
“No matter how hard Maria Lazar tries to bury her anti-abortion extremism from Wisconsinites, the facts don’t lie,” said Ripp. “This certainly raises concerns about what Lazar’s agenda would be on our state’s highest court, and on whose behalf she’d be working.”
Ripp also noted that Lazar’s anti-abortion record also earned her endorsements from two of Wisconsin’s most radical anti-abortion groups, Pro-Life Wisconsin and Wisconsin Right to Life.
Pro-Life Wisconsin’s agenda includes banning all abortions in Wisconsin with no exceptions. They also support amending the Wisconsin constitution to, as experts have said, ban IVF and most common forms of birth control.