Entrance to Senate Chambers in the Wisconsin State Capitol. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

The state Senate Health Committee cleared three bills Thursday, two of them on bipartisan votes, advancing them to the full Senate for consideration.

SB 4 allows direct primary care doctors, who charge patients on a monthly subscription, to practice without being regulated as part of the insurance industry. 

The bill passed 3-2, with the Senate committee’s two Democrats, Sens. Jeff Smith and Dora Drake, voting against recommending it for passage.

Drake said she voted against the measure because it lacked non-discrimination language that had been included in a previous version of the bill.

The bill from the 2023-24 legislative session included a non-discrimination section listing a series of civil-rights protections for patients. One of those items, forbidding discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” led two organizations, Wisconsin Family Action and the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, to oppose the legislation.

Although the legislation passed the Assembly on a voice vote in 2024 and was unanimously endorsed by both the Assembly and Senate health committees, it died after the state Senate failed to take it up.

The current bill states that direct primary care providers “may not decline to enter into or terminate a direct primary care agreement with a patient solely because of the patient’s health status.”

It has replaced language enumerating specific civil rights protections with a more general stipulation that it “shall not be construed to limit the application” of Wisconsin’s civil rights statute to a health care provider’s practice. The civil rights law bars discrimination based on race, sex and sexual orientation, but is silent on gender identity.

“As Chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, I refuse to support a new version of a bill that doesn’t provide protections for Wisconsinites that prevents discrimination from healthcare providers,” Drake told the Wisconsin Examiner via email.

The committee voted unanimously Thursday to recommend the other two bills.

SB 23 would make it possible for women who are covered by Medicaid in childbirth to maintain that coverage for a full year after the child is born. The postpartum Medicaid legislation has broad bipartisan support, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) has opposed extending the coverage, claiming it would expand “welfare.”

SB 14 requires health care providers to obtain a patient’s consent when they teach medical students how to do pelvic exams by having them practice on women under anesthesia. Authors of the bill and advocates have reported that some providers have a history of training students on the procedure with unconscious patients who have not been informed or given consent.

The committee also added a requirement that hospitals institute written policies for informed consent relating to pelvic exams under anesthesia. The amendment replaces language requiring an administrative rule implementing the requirement.

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan talks Wednesday morning about programs in Wisconsin that could be affected by Republican proposals to cut the federal budget. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), left, and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), right, also took part in the state Capitol press conference. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

As the Republican majority in Congress begins work on legislation to renew and expand the 2017 federal tax cut, Wisconsin Democrats met with reporters Wednesday to argue that the measure will have a devastating impact on the public.

The U.S. House has begun work on a budget reconciliation bill — complex legislation that will encompass a broad swath of federal programs. President Donald Trump endorsed the effort on X Wednesday.

Senate Democrats at a Washington, D.C., press conference, including Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, warned of “massive cuts” to Medicaid on the horizon Wednesday if the package is enacted, notwithstanding Trump’s comments this week that Medicare and Medicaid “won’t be touched.”

In Madison, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) along with Democratic leaders in the state Legislature gathered in the state Capitol Assembly parlor, where they focused not just on Medicaid but on a host of other programs that they said were important to Wisconsin.

House Republicans are seeking a $1.5 trillion cut in spending over 10 years, Pocan said, while raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, with the goal of a $4.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years.

Calculations by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that savings from extending the 2017 tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term would favor the richest 1% of taxpayers most dramatically.

“So this is about a tax cut for the wealthiest,” Pocan said. “It’s about a transfer of money from programs that affect the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class to the wealthiest — so that the rich will get even richer.”

Budget reconciliation bill

Under the budget reconciliation process, Pocan explained, Republicans have assigned spending targets to U.S. House committees for the agencies in their purview. The House Energy and Commerce Committee alone has been instructed to find $880 billion in cuts, Pocan said — and Medicaid is the largest program under the committee’s jurisdiction.

“And you know, really the better way to describe Medicaid is — that’s funding for opioid treatment, that’s funding for mental health, that’s funding for nursing home care, for maternity and infant care, help for people with disabilities, and a whole lot more,” Pocan said. “So it’s really about programs that affect people in Wisconsin.”

Medicaid serves more than 1 million people in Wisconsin, Pocan said, including one-third of Wisconsin children, 45% of working age people living with disabilities and 55% of nursing home residents.

Proposals circulating in Washington would cut $230 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). “That would result in about a 23% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP],” Pocan said. Some 702,000 Wisconsinites “benefit from the SNAP program, and it really is at risk.” 

Pocan scoffed at the idea that a project to cut government spending, headed by Elon Musk, was intended to promote government efficiency. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not an official federal agency.

“DOGE is something that was created to find waste, fraud and abuse in government,” Pocan said. “The reality is, that is a fraud. It is really about finding $4.5 trillion ultimately to have a tax cut.”

Lawmakers hear from anxious voters

Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said she and her colleagues in the Legislature are hearing daily from constituents anxious about the prospect of federal cutbacks.

“We are getting calls from concerned Wisconsinites about whether they will lose access to their health care or housing,” Neubauer said. “We hear those stories every day, and we know that the actions that Trump is taking at the federal level have real impacts, and we are going to do everything we can to protect the people of Wisconsin from these attacks.”

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein, the Senate minority leader, said she’s heard from farmers, parents and Medicaid recipients, among others, worried about changes in Washington.

“What happens in Congress over the next few weeks and months matters,” Hesselbein said. She urged Wisconsin voters to let their congressional representatives know about concerns they have.

“Contact Ron Johnson,” the Republican U.S. Senator from Oshkosh, Hesselbein said. “Let them know these real stories and what that’s going to mean to the people in our community. People are upset, they are worried. They’ve had enough, and we need to stop the madness.”

Impoverished students and veterans’ health

Speakers who joined Pocan highlighted the direct impact of other programs that have been targeted for reduction.

Title I funds go to school districts with a large number of children living in poverty, while the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides additional aid to schools for teaching students with disabilities. Title I directs about $235 million a year to Wisconsin and IDEA about $271 million, Pocan said, and both have been targeted for reductions.  

“Title I funding is a lifeline to my school right now, and for millions of students across America,” said Elizabeth O’Leary, a special education teacher in Madison. “These funds provide crucial support for instruction in reading, math, as well as special programs, after-school initiatives and summer learning opportunities.”

O’Leary described students with disabilities and students living in extreme poverty.

“Our school team works together to meet the basic needs of our students and also to teach them,” she said, adding that the school where she works has many students facing those and other difficulties.

“And while these students’ lives are difficult, they are so magnificent and they deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive,” O’Leary said. “Simply put, our students would not get the support they need, and staff would lose their jobs, without Title I funding.”

Other Trump administration actions outside the budget bill are also hitting Wisconsin, Pocan said, such as layoffs in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system.

Yvonne Duesterhoeft, a U.S. Air Force veteran, said the VA health system is a trusted health care provider for thousands of former service members.

“I wish everyone in America could have access to the type of efficient and comprehensive health care that I and many veterans have come to know in recent decades,” Duesterhoeft said.

Decades ago, she acknowledged, the system was underfunded and often indifferent to the needs of returning wartime veterans, but that has changed as Vietnam-era vets campaigned for, and won, important improvements in VA health care quality.

“We must guard against the recent and concerted fast-track effort to make VA health care terrible again,” she said.

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Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

On a 4-3 vote Tuesday the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission for not acting  against the city of Racine after the city used  mobile vans for in-person early voting in an election two years ago.

The ruling, written by Justice Jill Karofsky and concurred in by the three other members of the Court’s liberal majority, declared that the voter who brought the case lacked standing to demand a judicial review of the commission’s decision.

The case arose from a challenge to Racine’s use in the August 2022 primary election of a van that was sent around the city for early voting, also called in-person absentee voting, in the weeks before Election Day.

For the primary election that summer, Racine’s city clerk designated 22 early voting sites: City Hall and 21 other locations around the city. The clerk’s office dispatched a van with election equipment to those 21 sites for which notices were posted. Voters could obtain absentee ballots, vote and return their ballots to the vehicle.

On behalf of a Racine voter, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-wing law firm that has supported other challenges to local and state election practices, filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) charging that using the van for early voting violated state law.

The commission rejected the complaint, and WILL filed a petition in Racine County Circuit Court for judicial review of WEC’s decision. Judge Eugene Gasiorkiewicz ruled in January 2024 in WILL’s favor that the early voting van favored Democratic parts of the city and violated state law.

The judge held that the state law authorizing municipalities to establish alternate early voting locations applies to physical structures, not mobile vehicles. State law neither affirms nor prohibits mobile early voting sites, he wrote, but lacking “an express prohibition . . . does not mean mobile absentee ballot sites comport to procedures specified in the election laws.”

Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling sidesteps a direct interpretation of that question.

Karofsky wrote that the voter WILL represented lacked standing to take WEC to court over the issue.

State law authorizes an election official or a person who files a complaint “who is aggrieved” by a WEC order to take the matter to circuit court. Karofsky wrote that not everyone on the losing side of a WEC order is “aggrieved,” however, and that “to be aggrieved by a decision, one must have suffered an injury to a legally recognized interest as a result of the decision.”

The plaintiff in the WILL lawsuit, Kenneth Brown, didn’t show he suffered or will suffer an injury, she wrote.

In a dissent, Justice Rebecca Bradley criticized the decision’s stipulation about the meaning of “aggrieved” as too narrow. Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Brian Hagedorn each concurred in part with Bradley’s dissent. 

When WEC dismisses a voter’s complaint without taking action, Bradley wrote, “the voter’s legal right is adversely affected — the voter is aggrieved — and the voter may challenge WEC’s decision in a court of law.”

Bradley also criticized the majority for treating standing too narrowly. Instead, she wrote, the ruling should have taken up the underlying issue on the legality of mobile in-person absentee voting sites in place of fixed buildings.

In a statement, Lucas Vebber, deputy counsel for WILL, said that while the circuit court “determined the election officials in Racine acted unlawfully in their conduct of an election,” the decision Tuesday “does not address those issues, rather it silences Wisconsinites who seek to challenge such unlawful action.”

Law Forward, the voting-rights focused group that defended Racine’s mobile voting before the Court, issued a statement praising the outcome but expressing surprise and disappointment that the decision didn’t address voter suppression tactics that the organization blamed for the original legal challenge.

“The Court was right to toss Mr. Brown’s lawsuit, which sought to restrict absentee voting in one of Wisconsin’s most diverse communities. But a standing deficiency was perhaps the least problematic aspect of Mr. Brown’s lawsuit, which openly targeted Racine’s efforts to make voting more accessible,” said Scott Thompson, Law Forward’s staff counsel.

“Mr. Brown’s suit attacked the right to vote and equal protection under the Wisconsin Constitution,” Thompson said. “Avoiding any comment on such fundamental civil rights issues does little to strengthen our shared democracy.”

This report has been updated with a comment issued by Law Forward that was received after publication.

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Dr. Wendy Molaska of Fitchburg testifies on Feb. 12 in support of legislation to clarify that doctors charging patients under a monthly subscription program are not in the insurance business. (Screenshot/WisEye)

Dr. Wendy Molaska is a Wisconsin family practice doctor, but her patients don’t use their health insurance — if they have it — when under her care.

Instead, Molaska’s patients have a subscription for her services, paying $70 a month. They go to Molaska’s office when they feel sick, need a checkup, or have some other routine medical concern. She’ll see them as often as they need, she says — no extra charge.

Molaska is a direct primary care practitioner. Direct primary care, DPC for short, is prepaid outpatient health care. While both the doctors who practice it and their patients are just a drop in the health care ocean, their numbers are growing.

In back-to-back meetings last week, the health committees in both the Assembly and the Senate considered legislation to make it legally explicit that the subscription programs used by DPC doctors are not insurance plans and don’t have to be regulated like insurance.

The identical bills, AB-8 and SB-4, spell out some definitions, along with rights and standards, for direct primary care agreements and state that they are exempt from insurance law. More than half of states in the U.S. have similar laws. 

The concept won bipartisan support in the 2023-24 session of the Legislature but failed to make it to the governor’s desk.

“In insurance, you risk-share,” said Dr. Nicole Hemkes, owner of a group of direct primary care clinics, Advocate MD, testifying at the Assembly hearing Wednesday. “You’re paying a bunch of money into a [pool] and then the insurance is paying out on claims.”

Direct primary care is “basically a transactional relationship where you’re paying a monthly membership,” Hemkes said.

‘Old school medicine’

“This is the old school medicine of being able to actually take care of your patients the way they need to be taken care of,” Molaska told the Assembly Committee on Health, Aging and Long-Term Care.

She testified that neither she nor patients have to deal with the question of what insurance covers and what it doesn’t. The $70 monthly fee covers a broad range of in-office procedures and visits as frequent as a patient requires, she said.

Prescriptions, which she can dispense, and lab tests are extra, but Molaska said in an interview that they are often much less expensive when paid for out of pocket rather than as part of an insurance plan.

Molaska said there are about 100 direct primary care providers in Wisconsin, a number that has grown markedly starting in the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. If each provider has 500 patients, a typical DPC caseload, that would mean 50,000 Wisconsin people have joined the trend from the patient side.

In an interview, Molaska said that removing the uncertainty over whether regulators would try to apply the state’s insurance law to their operation could help motivate more doctors to provide direct primary care.

DPC practitioners say their approach is both cost-effective and patient-friendly.

Hemkes said patients with high-deductible health insurance plans might forgo a routine visit to the doctor to avoid an out-of-pocket expense they can’t afford.

“We are not trying to replace insurance,” Hemkes told Assembly members. Direct primary care “[is] meant to make health care more accessible to more people.”

Access to care without insurance

Some people opt for DPC as an alternative to a more expensive, comprehensive health plan, however. Molaska testified that in the Madison suburb of Fitchburg, where she practices, “the number of people without health insurance is 7.4%. At my clinic, 41.3% don’t have other health insurance.”

Many low-wage service workers have employers who don’t cover health care, and their own incomes are too high for Medicaid but not high enough for them to buy their own insurance, Molaska told the Wisconsin Examiner. With a direct primary care subscription, “at least they’re able to access primary care,” she said.

For specialty care and hospitalization, patients are still likely to need health insurance or alternative forms of coverage of some kind. Nevertheless, Molaska said, her fixed fee covers as many non-specialist visits to her office as a patient might need to make, as well as being able to call or text for consultation.

Molaska said the system has allowed her to limit the number of patients to about 500 people, in contrast to conventional medical groups where a single doctor’s caseload can be two, three or even four times that many.

Molaska said she calculated her monthly fee based on what existing DPC doctors were charging, the size that she chose for her caseload and her overhead costs and staff: two nurses, a certified medical interpreter and an office assistant. With direct care she doesn’t have to hire someone for coding insurance claims or billing for visits, she observed.

Longer visits, shorter waits

Some patients have health insurance that covers primary care, but choose a DPC provider instead, paying the monthly fee themselves — valuing the short wait time to get in and the longer and less-hurried visits, Molaska said.

Evan Danells, a Madison chef and restaurant owner who also testified at the Assembly hearing, told lawmakers that many restaurant operators have profit margins too small to allow them to buy insurance for employees. Direct primary care made it possible for him to cover his employees for basic health care, he said.

Danells is one of Molaska’s patients. He said her much smaller caseload allowed for more personal care rather than rushed appointments with a doctor who would “look at me like they’re seeing me for the first time over and over again . . .  because they just had 2,500 patients last year.”

Hemkes said direct primary care doctors aim to make their services broadly affordable — not like medical practitioners who provide “concierge medicine,” charging wealthy patients five-figure sums for special access.

Another misconception, Hemkes said, is that direct primary care “selects out healthy patients.”

The legislation guards against that possibility with a provision stating the direct primary care providers “may not decline to enter into or terminate a direct primary care agreement with a patient solely because of the patient’s health status.”

At Advocate MD, which has three clinics in the greater Madison area and one in Janesville, “our patients in our practice run the spectrum from young, healthy people to older people with multiple chronic medical issues,” Hemkes testified. “Having an hour-long visit with that patient is very useful to be able to provide comprehensive care to them, to help them navigate all their specialists.”

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Around Madison, supporters of UW Health nurses seeking union representation have posted yard signs expressing their position. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

A campaign for union representation by nurses working for UW Health reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court Wednesday with an argument over whether state law grants them collective bargaining rights or has definitively taken those rights away.

Tamara Packard, the lawyer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), argued that the employees of UW Hospital and Clinics Authority — the corporation that operates as UW Health — have union rights under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act.

“The language that’s in the statute now incorporates all employers except those that are excluded,” Packard said — and the hospital system authority is not one of those.

An attorney for the hospital authority asserted that the UW Health employees’ union rights were explicitly removed as part of the 2011 law known as Act 10, however.

Act 10, enacted early in Scott Walker’s first term as governor, stripped public employees — except for most police and firefighters — of all but the most rudimentary union rights.

But it also made changes related to the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority — a corporate entity that was spun off in 1996 from the University of Wisconsin under 1995 Act 27. The law created a public authority with connections to the state but getting no direct state funding.

Act 27 specified that the hospital system authority was an employer under the Peace Act and included a guarantee of union rights for the hospital system’s employees, who were represented at the time. But Act 10 undid both of those provisions, said James Goldschmidt, of Quarles & Brady, representing UW Health.

The law repealed legal language “expressly stating that the authority is a covered employer,” Goldschmidt said, along with  language “expressly obligating the authority to engage in collective bargaining.” And it repealed all references to the hospital authority in the Peace Act, along with all references to the Peace Act in the law creating the authority.

“Repeal, repeal, repeal,” Goldschmidt said. “You cannot read this act [Act 10] that the Legislature enacted without seeing those changes. Those are part and parcel of the law itself.”

Widespread assumption

For 11 years after Act 10’s passage, virtually everyone involved — union and hospital officials alike — assumed that the law barred collective bargaining for UW Health employees. When nurses employed by the hospital system announced in December 2019 that they wanted to be represented again by SEIU, they framed their demand as a request for voluntary engagement with hospital system management to discuss wages and working conditions.

In 2021, that changed, starting with a legal opinion — also written by Packard, an attorney for the Madison law firm of Pines Bach — that Act 10 didn’t bar collective bargaining at UW Health. A subsequent opinion by state Attorney General Josh Kaul said that UW Health might fall under the Peace Act, but sidestepped a firm declaration on that point.

In September 2022, as nurses demanding union recognition were on the verge of a three-day strike, SEIU and UW Health officials reached an agreement brokered by Gov. Tony Evers that included a joint petition to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC).

In the petition, the union argued that the hospital should be considered an employer under the Peace Act, while UW Health argued that Act 10 barred collective bargaining at the hospital system. WERC sided with UW Health, and Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost subsequently affirmed the employment commission’s conclusion.

That was the ruling before the Supreme Court Wednesday.

Justice Brian Hagedorn noted — as UW Health’s lawyers did in their brief on the case — that in a federal court challenge to Act 10 more than a decade ago, SEIU had itself stated the union lost bargaining rights at UW Health.

Packard acknowledged as much, but said the union’s position now was “based on, largely, the law that has developed in the last 13 years.”

Defining an ‘employer’

The argument centered on wording in the Employment Peace Act defining an employer, and whether Act 10’s provisions applying to the UW Hospital and Clinics Authority clearly excluded the hospital system from that definition.

Packard said that the Peace Act defines a “person” in the corporate sense as an “employer” with workers who have a right to collective bargaining.

The Court has previously affirmed that UW Hospital and Clinics Authority is a “person” in another legal context. For that reason, Packard said, “the plain language” of the law requires treating the hospital authority as an employer under the Peace Act.

Act 10 repealed language in Act 27 explicitly declaring that the hospital system is a Peace Act employer. But that didn’t change how the act defines an employer, she said.

The Legislature explicitly excluded public employees and unions from the Peace Act’s definition of an employer. “The Legislature . . . if it meant to, could have included the hospital and clinics authority in that list of exceptions, and it did not,” Packard said.

Goldschmidt countered that the Peace Act’s definition of person “does not include a special entity, like the [hospital and clinics] authority, which is a legislatively created public body.”

When Act 27 was passed, the Legislature defined the new hospital and clinics authority as an employer subject to the Peace Act because “it was neither fish nor fowl — it was neither fully public nor fully private,” Goldschmidt said. Act 10 took away the Peace Act’s coverage, he reiterated.

Justice Rebecca Dallet questioned treating the hospital authority as a distinctly different entity, however.

“It’s a private corporation,” Dallet said, and has been treated as one in unrelated court decisions. When the Legislature passed Act 10, she said, “regardless of what they were repealing . . . the words on the page still say ‘employer’ and that a corporation is an employer.”

Packard argued that the language in the Peace Act is unambiguous, making no exception for UW Health as an employer. She called that a sufficient reason to declare the act covers the hospital and clinics authority without delving into the history of the law.

Two of the Court’s three-member conservative wing took exception to that argument.

Statutory history “is part of the way we make sense of the text,” said Hagedorn. “It seems that your argument is entirely premised on sort of a myopic focus on text and ignoring the statutory history context.”

Justice Rebecca Bradley agreed. “Act 27 was quite explicit in including the [hospital] authority in the definition of employer,” she told Packard. “Act 10 repealed that language. You can’t win unless you ask us to disregard that statutory history. That’s enacted law.”

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State Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) testifies on Tuesday, Feb. 11, in favor of legislation to require state employees to work in the office five days a week starting July 1. (Screenshot/WisEye)

State employees who worked in the office before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 would have to return to working in person starting July 1 under a proposed bill that went before a state Senate committee Tuesday.

“The pandemic is now over and has been for quite a while,” said State Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie), testifying at a public hearing on SB-27 in the Senate Committee on Licensing, Regulatory Reform, State and Federal Affairs. “Yet a high volume of state duties that required in-person execution prior to 2020 are still being performed in locations outside of the state offices in which they were long housed prior to the pandemic.”

Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), the bill’s Senate author, cited decisions by major U.S. employers to return to at least partial in-office schedules. “Returning to work in person makes sense and forces accountability,” Tomczyk said.

Nedweski and Tomczyk were the only witnesses to testify at Tuesday’s hearing. There is not an Assembly companion bill, but Nedweski is the lead Assembly co-sponsor of the Senate legislation. She also chairs the Assembly’s new Committee on Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency.

Republican state lawmakers have been pushing for state employees to end remote work for most of the last four years.

Meanwhile, the Department of Administration (DOA) and the administration of Gov. Tony Evers have been moving forward with a plan, Vision 2030, to reduce the state’s real estate footprint.

No administration representatives testified at Tuesday’s hearing. But in a memo to reporters Tuesday afternoon, Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, said Vision 2030 is based on moving to a “modern and hybrid work environment” mixing remote and in-office work “in order to continue to be a competitive employer and bolster our efforts to recruit, train, and retain workers statewide.”

If SB-27 is enacted, she said, returning to in-office-only work would require more private leases for office space or reopening buildings that are to be closed and sold, or both. The administration has projected savings of more than $7 million in occupancy costs and more than $540 million in deferred maintenance costs.

Reversing those plans “would neither be pragmatic nor fiscally prudent,” Cudaback said.

At the hearing, Nedweski emphasized that the bill’s intent is not simply to bar all remote work, but she argued that the state hasn’t systematically evaluated its impact.

“We don’t have a handle on what’s going on,” she said. “So the idea would be, everybody, please come back and let’s figure out what the best situation is.”

Two years ago the Legislature’s Joint Audit Committee commissioned the Legislative Audit Bureau to review remote work and space allocation in state government. The resulting report said the state lacked comprehensive data on the extent of remote work and recommended more detailed monitoring and documentation of remote work agreements and practices.

Democrats on the five-member Senate committee balked at the legislation, calling it inflexible and a potential deterrent to the state’s ability to hire.

Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) noted with remote work more state employees have been able to work from counties across Wisconsin, not just in its two largest cities. “If those people are going to have to keep their jobs and be in the office, which I assume would be Madison, are they going to be forced to give up their jobs?” he asked.

Nedweski and Tomczyk said that employees who were hired to work remotely or had employment agreements allowing remote work before the pandemic would not be required to return to an office five days a week.

But Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee), said the legislation’s wording appeared to be more narrowly written. “I am worried about this being wildly inflexible, and you’re talking about a level of flexibility that is not contained within the bill,” he said.

Nedweski said she “would be more than happy” to add language “that underscores that we already have DOA policy in place to allow for flexibility.”

Larson replied that the bill “would be a law that would override the policy.”

In an email message, Nedweski’s office staff member Tami Rongstad told the Wisconsin Examiner that there would be an amendment to exempt the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics from the bill “and clarify that the requirement to return to onsite work would not apply to duties that were performed off-site prior to March 1, 2020.”

Rongstad said Nedweski “was open to considering adding clarifying language to the bill related to future telework options for state employees beyond the July 1, 2025, return to in-person work date,” based on existing terms for remote work in the state human resources handbook. 

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Don Millis and Ann Jacob, the former and current chairs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, testify Tuesday, Feb. 4, at an Assembly hearing on a commission rule for election observers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For nearly two years the Wisconsin Elections Commission has been developing a rule that would govern election observers.

Observers have long turned up to oversee the voting process on Election Day, representing the Democratic and Republican parties. Historically it was an uncontroversial civic exercise. Observers, says Jay Heck, director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, typically focused on whether voting machines worked properly, lines (if they existed at all) were moving smoothly and the voting process was uneventful.

But the number of observers and the number of groups sponsoring them have increased over the last several elections — along with growing polarization around voting rights and ongoing legal and legislative battles over conflicting claims of voter fraud and voter suppression.

Last week, those conflicts surfaced when lawmakers heard testimony for and against a proposed Wisconsin Elections Commission rule that would codify the rights of election observers as well as set limits on their behavior.

Wisconsin’s election law — rewritten in 2015 when the Wisconsin Elections Commission was established — requires polling place election chiefs to designate spaces for election observers between 3 and 8 feet from the table where people register to vote and the table where registered voters sign in and receive their voter number.

Beyond that, however, the law leaves a lot open-ended, said Don Millis, a Republican member of the commission and its former chair, at an Assembly hearing Tuesday, Feb. 4. 

Mills, who was appointed to the commission in 2022, recalled that a fellow Republican told him the body should write a rule on election observers because the state elections statute “is very vague and that some clerks are not treating Republican observers properly.”

State elections law requires the commission to write a rule addressing the conduct of observers and their interactions with election officials, Millis said, but the body had not previously carried out that assignment.

From August 2022 to October 2024

The rulemaking process started in August 2022. Gov. Tony Evers approved the rule’s final draft Oct. 3, 2024.

Tuesday’s hearing before the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections was the next step in the process of establishing a rule.

The proposed rule doesn’t change the state law that specifies the area set aside for election observers. But Millis said the rule includes a number of provisions setting forth rights for observers that aren’t in the current law.

For example, the rule specifies that observers can begin on Election Day either when the polls open at 7 a.m. or when the vote counting tabulation machines are reset to zero, whichever is earlier. It also allows observers to move about in the designated area for observers, ask questions of election officials and to talk quietly among themselves, Millis said.

The rule allows observers to see non-confidential information, Millis said. It does not allow them to see voters’ photo IDs presented as required under state law, which it defines as confidential.

“Without these rules, we’re going to have situations where there are no uniform [requirements], and I think that in certain areas, public observers will feel that they are intimidated and not able to do what the rules [would allow],” Millis testified.

“This is a bipartisan effort,” said Ann Jacobs, the elections commission’s current chair, who joined Millis in testifying in favor of the rule.

State law divides the commission’s six members evenly, with three appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans, and stipulates that the chair’s job must shift every two years between representatives of the two parties.

Advisory committee with ‘a wide net’

Before drafting the rule, Millis said, the commission assembled a committee of interested persons to share their concerns about the current handling of election observers and discuss what they would want a rule to include.

Millis said the commission cast “a wide net” for participants. The committee included election clerks, poll workers, political party representatives and representatives from groups focused on voting and elections, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

There also were members from True the Vote and the Wisconsin Election Integrity Network — both of which have amplified allegations of voter fraud in Wisconsin and have recruited election observers as well.

As the elections commission and its staff began drafting the rule, “if there were dissenting voices, we wanted to hear it,” Millis said.

The commission voted on each provision, approving them 6-0, Millis said, The final vote, however, on Sept. 11, 2024, was 5-1, with Republican Robert Spindell, voting against approval.

Testifying Tuesday in favor of the rule, Eileen Newcomer, voter education manager for the League of Women Voters, said that without it, the elections commission can only offer guidelines to local election administrators.

“There are no requirements that election clerks and observers adhere to the guidance,” Newcomer said. Participants in the league’s election observer program who have worked at several polling places have reported that “there are different rules from one polling place to another.”

Newcomer was among the advisory committee’s participants.

But a string of activists who have promoted voter-fraud allegations — including some who also took part in the advisory committee — testified at the hearing against the rule.

Ken Dragotta, who was on the advisory panel representing True the Vote, criticized the rule for not addressing absentee ballots, which he said are “a privilege” under state law and “must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse.”

“Election laws are already far too complex for the average election official to properly navigate,” Dragotta said. The rule “does nothing but obstruct the legal rights of citizens to observe the election process and puts them at greater risk in the process, in addition to provide additional authority of election officials to control the movement and action of the observers.”

Among the other witnesses criticizing the rule was former State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a Menomonee Falls Republican who previously advocated overturning Wisconsin’s 2020 vote in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump’s reelection bid. Several investigations and court cases confirmed Biden as the winner in 2020.

Brandtjen reiterated Dragotta’s assertion that the rule would subject observers to being penalized at the polls by hostile chief election inspectors. She listed previous incidents when, she asserted, observers had been unfairly challenged by election clerks. She also called for the Republican-majority Legislature and Evers, a Democrat, to work out new legislation to address the subject.

State Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Greenville) questioned whether the split state government would produce a law “any better than what this is.” He also observed that previous incidents Brandtjen pointed to happened under the current legal framework.

“I’ve got a folder full of people here complaining about what has happened in the past,” Murphy said. “I’m trying to figure out whether the change is better or worse than the status quo.”

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A visitor to Sen. Ron Johnson's Madison office Thursday displays a sign, opposing confirmation of Russ Vought to head the White House Office of Management and Budget. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

About 40 people gathered outside Sen. Ron Johnson’s East Side Madison office to protest the ongoing federal funding freeze and to demand that the Republican senator vote against confirming Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s choice to head the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Vought, who has advocated for the president to have the right to impound federal funds already in the budget, is widely seen as the architect of the funding freeze announced last week. The U.S. Senate confirmed him on a party-line vote Thursday evening. 

The visit to Johnson’s office was led by the Sauk Prairie chapter of Indivisible, a political activist group organized during Trump’s first administration to challenge his policies. The freeze is “going to hurt a lot of people, especially with what will happen to the economy here probably soon,” Sue Heintz, an organizer for the group, said in an interview after the group dispersed. 

Members took turns telling Tom Petri, Johnson’s state legislative director, about their concerns and submitting written statements as well. 

David Dowell, a physician, decried the cutoff of AIDS prevention and treatment funds overseas. 

“We have saved so many lives in other countries with treating AIDS,” Dowell told Petri. “People’s AIDS treatment has stopped immediately — they’re going to die. And that’s because of this just random [act to] stop funding that’s already paid for…That’s hateful. That’s evil.”

“I don’t understand Sen. Johnson’s unwillingness to even question anything that Trump has done and is doing,” Brenda Ness of Sauk Prairie told Petri when it was her turn. 

Several brought up the funding freeze and registered their opposition to Elon Musk’s access to the U.S. Treasury payment system, suggesting that granting him that access was illegal.

Petri replied to one of Johnson’s constituents that Johnson “is in support of the president’s efforts to put as much light on where our government is spending its money.” 

Asked  why the court orders halting the freeze didn’t seem to have an effect, Petri responded, “I think what you’re seeing is the administration moving quickly with [Trump’s] directives and decisions.” 

“And then you’re seeing the federal court system rule and either block some things or issue injunctions against some things,” he added, “and then, ultimately, Congress will take steps to ensure that the law is being followed.”

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Children and a teacher sit at a table at a child care center. In Wisconsin, at least five Head Start child care centers have not yet gotten funds they've applied for from the federal government despite having incurred the expenses the money would cover. (Getty Images)

At least five Wisconsin Head Start child care programs for low-income families have reported that they’re still unable to collect federal funds to cover their routine costs in the last two weeks.

On Thursday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) sent a letter to Trump administration officials demanding they address the unexplained halt in payments.

“It continues to be a very significant problem,” said Jenny Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, the membership organization of Wisconsin’s 39 Head Start providers. Mauer said that as of late Thursday afternoon, at least five of those providers have not yet been able to receive payments for routine expenses submitted under their contractual agreements with the federal government.

The funding halt coincided with a broad freeze ordered by the Trump administration in federal grant and loan disbursement starting the last week of January.

Administration officials said the funding freeze did not include Head Start funds. Despite those assertions, Since Tuesday, Jan. 28, Head Start programs in Wisconsin and across the country have reported being unable to get paid through the online portal that processes their routine payment draw requests. 

The delays have persisted a week after two federal court orders to the administration to lift its freeze on payments.

“Up until Monday last week, these were not issues that our programs experienced,” Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner on Thursday afternoon. She said Head Start directors around the state who have been with the program for up to a decade have confirmed the current problem is unprecedented.

“Typically we have really stellar communications with the Office of Head Start,” Mauer said. “Typically things work very smoothly.”

Fond du Lac program: 10 days without payment

In the lower Fox Valley, a three-county community action agency in Fond du Lac has yet to receive a payment for monthly Head Start expenses submitted 10 days ago.

ADVOCAP provides community services for Fond du Lac, Winnebago and Green Lake counties, including operating a Head Start child care program with three centers in Fond du Lac County and one in Green Lake County. The centers combined enroll 202 children, serving 191 families. 

April Mullins-Datko, ADVOCAP’s Head Start director, said the program’s expenses for January were submitted on Tuesday, Jan. 28 through the federal payment management system website. The expenses are usually about $250,000 a month.

Instead of the usual automatic acknowledgement message when the information is uploaded, “we got a ‘pending review’ message,” Mullins-Datko told the Wisconsin Examiner. 

She is accustomed to seeing the payment deposited in the agency’s account in 24 to 48 hours. As of Thursday, however, “we still cannot access our funding,” Mullins-Datko said. “This morning, the payment management website is not even online. It’s having a pretty big impact.”

On Wednesday, ADVOCAP released a statement outlining the halt in funds and its potential impact on the program. 

“ADVOCAP is doing everything in our power to continue providing uninterrupted Head Start programming while we await resolution. However, if the funding delay extends into next month, we will need to assess the implications for the future of our program,” the agency’s statement said. 

ADVOCAP’s current Head Start contract with the federal government runs through Dec. 31, 2028, Mullins-Datko said. The federal rules for the grant require the recipient agency to incur the expense, then submit those documents for reimbursement. Usually “it’s dependable. It’s just recently that it’s not,” she said.

Mullins-Datko said she has tried contacting federal Head Start staff in Chicago and Washington, D.C., but received no response. 

“Right now we’re having to start February services without cash flow coming in,” she said. “Currently we’re staying open, but we’re running on a line of credit that only goes so far.”

The vast majority of families the ADVOCAP Head Start program serves — 93% — “are working families,” Mullins-Datko said. “They’re working and trying their very best to make ends meet.”

In December, some child care providers in the Fond du Lac area closed, she added. “Child care is already difficult to find, and it’s very expensive,” Mullins-Datko said. Without Head Start, “Our families wouldn’t have access to child care.”

Reaching out to lawmakers

Mullins-Datko said she made 39 calls to the offices of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)  and U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Glenbeuhlah), as well as Baldwin.

On Thursday, a member of Baldwin’s staff called her, several days after her first inquiry. “They let me know that they’ve been flooded with calls and they apologized for not getting back sooner,” Mullins-Datko said. “Still no access to funds, but I remain hopeful.”

She said she has not heard back from the other lawmakers, however.

In a letter Thursday to Dorothy Fink, acting secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and Tala Hooban, acting Head Start director, Baldwin called attention to the persistence of the delays.

“Head Start programs in Wisconsin are continuing to have problems accessing their funds, which raises continued uncertainty about their ability to keep their doors open,” Baldwin wrote. “This is unacceptable and requires your immediate attention.”

Baldwin demanded an accounting of directives from the Trump administration in freezing funds as well as directives after the court orders to suspend the freeze. 

She also demanded information on the number of Head Start grant recipients who had trouble or were unable to access the payment system from Jan. 28 on, as well as details on the reasons recipients were unable to get access to the system. 

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Protesters rally Wednesday outside the Wisconsin Capitol building in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Julie Mankowski was alarmed from the day Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20 and followed it with a flurry of executive orders and other actions: He erased U.S. policy references to gender diversity, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, pardoned people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

“I knew it was going to accelerate,” Mankowski told the Wisconsin Examiner Wednesday, “and I did not want them to keep their foot on that gas.”

That is why she was out on the steps of the Wisconsin state Capitol Wednesday, holding a sign declaring “Forward!” — one of hundreds who showed up to protest the actions that Trump and his associates have taken in the first two and a half weeks of his administration.

People at the rally brandished home-made signs with no shortage of issues on which to call out the 47th president of the United States. 

Signs supported the rights of LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are trans and gender-nonconforming. Signs promoted reproductive rights. Signs decried fascism and equated Trump with Nazis.

Signs attacked Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation document that Trump denied any connection to during his campaign but has been widely seen as foretelling much of the president’s actions since he took office, including the freezing of federal funds.

Signs defended immigrants — targeted by tough new deportation orders and Trump’s attempt, blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday, to undo the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

 And many signs attacked Elon Musk, the billionaire to whom Trump has given access to an increasingly large chunk of the government, most notably the federal payments system. One called for deporting the South African-born Musk.

A peaceful and raucous demonstration

The event was both peaceful and raucous. There were no organized counter demonstrators evident, although one or two arguments erupted with lone Trump supporters who worked their way into the crowd.

A small collection of speakers addressed the gathering crowd on the west steps of the Capitol facing Madison’s iconic State Street.

One led the crowd in a brief round of singing John Lennon’s anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.” Several reminded the crowd of upcoming spring elections — a primary election Feb. 18 and a general election for the next state Supreme Court justice on April 1.

That prompted a brief chant of the name of Susan Crawford, the Dane County judge endorsed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (in what’s officially a nonpartisan race) and viewed as the bulwark against returning the Court’s majority from four liberals to four conservatives.

Mankowski was the last speaker of the group, alternating between an uncooperative public address system microphone and a bullhorn.

“We are here because we are facing a threat to our collective existence,” she said. “We are facing a threat to our democracy and to our freedom.”

She spoke of the hundreds who were there, and countless more who didn’t show up.

“Every single person here is in pain. They’re afraid, they’re angry,” Mankowski said. “There are people who are not here, who are so afraid they couldn’t bring themselves to come.”

The crowd cheered her on, but she sought as well to break through to those whose cheers masked their anxiety and whose anxiety paralyzed their will. Everyone should feel welcome at a protest such as this one, she told them. Everyone should feel permission to raise their voice.

“Every single thing that you can possibly do, you do,” Mankowski said. “It doesn’t matter how small it is. It doesn’t matter how little of an impact you think it will have. It will have an impact. We all — we all must be — we all must be grains of sand in the gears of tyranny.”

The eyes of the world are on the United States, she said.

“There are so many people in the world right now who are watching us. They’re watching America. Because if it gets a hold here, where are they going now? I do not want a legacy of fascism to be a legacy of our country,” Mankowski said.

Parade around the Capitol

A parade around the Capitol followed, with a crowd large enough to stretch more than five blocks — three sides of Capitol Square that surrounds the building.

Afterward, while a portion of the group continued part way down State Street, Mankowski stayed back and talked about her decision to join Wednesday’s protest. 

An optician in Madison, Mankowski is accustomed to social activism. She took a role in putting together a July 4 demonstration that followed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade.

“I’m not shy about what I believe in and I think that being quiet about what we believe in is how we start to get separated from one another,” she said.

She joined an impromptu protest outside the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 29, and returned over the weekend. By then she’d heard about the protest planned for Wednesday — a loosely organized collection of events that were supposed to take place at noon in all 50 states.

Across the country in the days leading up to Wednesday, word spread on social media about the day of protests. Skepticism spread as well, as people questioned the absence of endorsements from high-profile organizations.

The fact-checking site Snopes.com posted an article Tuesday quoting a subreddit moderator who said the protests were “completely decentralized” in planning and execution. In Madison, some standing activist groups made plans to join, then backed away, uncertain about the event’s credibility or safety.

By the time noon arrived on Capitol Square, however, hundreds of people had packed onto the concrete staircase and spilled over onto the grass-covered hillside in front of the building.

Mankowski said she understood why some people had been wary of Wednesday’s demonstration, considering the current climate in the country. 

She pointed especially to the Trump administration’s actions on immigration and birthright citizenship, plans to send deported immigrants to Guantanamo or to prisons in El Salvador, and the use of pictures from deportation actions “as functionally propaganda images.”

“Those are pictures of human beings,” she said. “It’s not numbers and stacks, that’s people that they are using as a tool to make more people afraid: ‘If we did it to them, it could happen to you.’”

“People are tense and they are on edge,” she said. “And when things like a protest announcement starts to happen, people don’t just think of what it could be for — they think about how it could be used against them, because they’re seeing many aspects of their lives being turned against them right now.”

People have lost trust in institutions, she said, and they aren’t even sure about their neighbors. “They feel unmoored.”

Mankowski sees voters as increasingly detached from politics and political news, a consequence, she says, of feeling disenfranchised. “In their mind their vote doesn’t count,” she said. “And realistically, people who want our democracy to fail want you to think your vote doesn’t count.”

The road away from that apathy, she believes, starts with authenticity and connection.

“Being real with people is the best way to reach people, because people are real,” Mankowski said. “Like, our lives are real, the things we’re experiencing are real, and showing them that you, too, are real and that you have real things in your life, things that you care about, that you care about them, that you care about the fact that they are in pain and that they are unhappy and that they are feeling detached from reality.”

She pointed to her poster, which celebrated “The Wisconsin Idea,” a historic vision of the state’s university system that expressed its role as serving everyone in the state. Wednesday’s demonstration, with all its informality and diversity, demonstrated that sense of inclusion, she suggested.

“This is supposed to be, we, the people of Wisconsin,” Mankowski said. “It is not actually an organization. It is the people of Wisconsin — whoever showed up on that day, you know, to do their work.”

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Children outside with a child care teacher at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

More than half a dozen child care centers that serve low-income families through the federal Head Start program have been waiting for more than a week to be repaid for expenses they’ve already incurred for payroll, supplies and food for the children in their care.

Head Start and Early Head Start are federally funded programs that provide early education and child care to children from low-income families. Wisconsin has 39 Head Start child care providers serving 16,000 children across the state and employing about 4,500 staff, said Jenny Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

“The chaos and uncertainty have been deeply earth-shattering,” Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday.

Mauer said providers across the state who receive federal grant payments for Head Start have seen delays in receiving their payments. She has been in touch with all 39 and, as of Tuesday, there were seven providers serving about 3,000 children that haven’t been paid by the federal government for at least a week, she said.

“This is going to get really serious if this doesn’t get resolved soon,” Mauer said. “We’re not getting much in the way of answers. We’re not getting good explanations about anything. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

The Head Start payments stopped at the same time that a Trump administration memo announced a week ago that a broad array of federal grant and loan payments would be suspended. Two federal judges have ordered the White House to halt the suspension in payments, but there have been widespread reports of funds that have still not been released.

“People think the freeze is over,” said Rep. Andrew Hysell (D-Sun Prairie), whose district includes a child care provider affected and who posted a Facebook video decrying the federal action. “Yet these [federal] agencies are not providing the funds.”

The National Head Start Association, a membership organization for Head Start child care providers, has reported similar problems across the country.

“We’re definitely not alone, that’s for sure,” Mauer said.

Reach Dane, a Madison child care agency that provides child care for about 1,000 children in Dane and Green counties, is waiting on $600,000 that the nonprofit is due from Head Start, said Jen Bailey, Reach Dane’s executive director. The organization had to tap into its bank line of credit after payments failed to come through in the last week.

The funds are needed to make payroll for Reach Dane’s staff of 250, including child care teachers, people in food service and bus drivers who pick up and drop off children in the program.

“We’re kind of flying blind in a chaos storm, trying to figure out what is happening and why,” said Bailey, who is also president of the Wisconsin Head Start Association board.

Federal payments to Head Start programs are reimbursements for expenses providers have already incurred. Providers are accustomed to logging into a federal portal, submitting the expense information and receiving a reimbursement in about 24 hours.

Reach Dane typically submits its requests for payment once a week or so, Bailey said. A week ago Monday, Reach Dane was unable to log in to the portal at all, however.

Late Tuesday, Jan. 28, the portal was once again accessible, and Reach Dane submitted a payment request. A second payment request was submitted on Friday, Jan. 31.

“We have not received either of those,” Bailey said Tuesday. “As of right now both still show as pending in the system.”

In addition to serving Head Start children through its own child care centers, Reach Dane also works with private child care providers who enroll children from low-income families.

One private partner is The Playing Field, a nonprofit that operates two child care centers in Madison, one of them on the city’s West Side where the enrollment includes Head Start children. Reach Dane pays The Playing Field monthly to cover its Head Start kids.

Participating in Head Start is part of The Playing Field’s mission, said Abbi Kruse, who founded The Playing Field a decade ago with the goal of creating “an early childhood education program that any family would choose for their child.” From the start the organization’s model was to enroll children “from really different socio-economic and racial backgrounds,” she said, overcoming segregation in all its forms.

At the West Side location, enrollment is about one-third children on scholarship, one-third children whose parents can afford the full cost, and one-third who are covered under Head Start or Early Head Start. “Without that funding, they could not attend our program,” Kruse said. “Without that funding, we definitely could not sustain our model.”

Providers, families spread the word in the Capitol for Evers’ child care investment

Kruse said that Reach Dane sends a Head Start payment once a month to The Playing Field, which received the February payment on Monday. But if Reach Dane can’t resume receiving its federal funds, “obviously that’s not sustainable for them to continue doing that,” she said.

Some of the children served by her organization are from families living in shelters, sleeping in cars or hotels for the unhoused, for example, Kruse said. They may rely on The Playing Field not just for child care but for meals and other support, such as parenting classes.

“There’s a lot of support for families in our model, and to rip that away from people is just cruel,” Kruse said.

Mauer said that providers unable to collect the federal funds they’re due are scrambling to meet the shortfall.

The federal government requires that recipients must disburse the money they get within three days after collecting it. “They’re not sitting on a set of federal reserves to pay people,” Mauer said. “This is money for service already rendered.”

Providers who are on the hook for funds “are doing everything they can to keep their doors open,” she said. “They’re talking to creditors, they’ve opened up lines of credit, they’re talking to community partners and moving things around.”

If Head Start providers don’t survive, the impact on employers could be severe.

“The majority of folks that come to Head Start are working families,” Mauer said. Without child care, “that would mean those parents would have to make tough choices. It’s a terrible situation.”

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Heather Murray, flanked by state Rep. Alex Joers, left, speaks to reporters about Gov. Tony Evers' budget proposal for $500 million to support child care providers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Lawmakers, child care providers and families — and some of their kids — spread out through the state Capitol Tuesday, hoping to persuade lawmakers to support a $500 million state investment in child care in the budget proposal that Gov. Tony Evers will unveil later in February.

“This needs to happen now and it needs to be sustained,” said State Rep. Alex Joers (D-Middleton) at a news conference Tuesday morning in the Wisconsin Assembly parlor.

Heather Murray operates a child care center in Waunakee, north of Madison, that has a licensed capacity for 60 children, but she’s kept the enrollment at half that number because she cannot hire enough child care teachers.

“When I decided to start a center in my community, my goal was to make sure families could go to work and leave their children in a setting where they knew their child would be nurtured, educated and cared for during the most vulnerable time in their lives,” Murray said. “To provide these quality experiences for children, I need staff.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wisconsin was able to use federal funds from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to pay child care providers monthly stipends that helped them bolster wages for employees without having to raise the fees they charge parents.

The Child Care Counts funds, originally $20 million a month, were cut to half that amount in mid-2023. When the Republican majority in the state Legislature declined to pick up the tab for continuing the program in the 2023-25 state budget, Evers, a Democrat, reallocated some federal funds to extend the subsidy program through June 2025.

Murray said Child Care Counts allowed her to increase pay for child care teachers, but she has been unable to afford health benefits for her staff. When the state subsidy was cut in half, she said, she had to raise tuition 9%. Two families left her center because they couldn’t afford the higher rate.

“If these investments for early education do not remain in the governor’s budget, there’s a possibility I will need to raise my tuition by $65 per week per child, to keep my doors open and pay my staff the wages they are currently getting,” Murray said, adding that in surveys, Wisconsin providers have said they will have to raise their fees without government support.

“If providers keep raising tuition, the average working family will be priced out of child care in the state,” Murray said.

Split up into five groups of four each, Murray, parents and the children that accompanied them went to visit the offices of legislators, focusing on the 16 members of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, where the state budget will be written in late spring and early summer.

None of the committee’s Republican members made themselves available, Murray said in an interview a few hours later, although the group had an enjoyable conversation with two of the four Democrats on the committee. The children distributed placards that said “Invest in Us.”

“I’m hoping it gets some attention,” Murray said.

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WisCovered.com is operated by the Wisconsin Office of Insurance (OCI) to inform consumers seeking health insurance about their options, including BadgerCare and the Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplace (Screenshot | WIsCovered.com)

For the second year in a row, a record number of Wisconsinites signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, state officials announced Friday.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which tracks enrollment in health plans through the ACA, reported that 313,579 Wisconsin residents enrolled in insurance through the federal insurance marketplace during the open enrollment period from Nov. 1, 2024, to Jan. 15, 2025.

This year’s enrollment includes 47,250 more people than the 2024 open enrollment period, which set the previous record — an 18% increase, according to the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI).

The marketplace, Healthcare.gov, was created under the ACA for people to purchase individual or family health insurance policies if they don’t have health insurance coverage through an employer or other group and don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare.

Marketplace plans are sold by private insurance companies and must meet standards set under the ACA for comprehensive coverage. One of those is that people with a preexisting health condition cannot be denied coverage, charged higher rates or have their insurance coverage canceled.

For people who are currently enrolled, health insurance premium costs for ACA plans have been offset by federal subsidies, tied to a person’s income. The subsidies were expanded under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The increased subsidies will expire after this year unless Congress agrees to extend them.

A majority of Wisconsinites signing up for ACA plans have qualified for the subsidies and saved an average of $573 on their monthly insurance premiums, according to the office of Gov. Tony Evers.

Before Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, both Democrats, took office in 2019, Wisconsin had been part of a multi-state lawsuit that sought to overturn the ACA. The health care law was enacted in 2010 under then-President Barack Obama.

Evers and Kaul withdrew Wisconsin from the lawsuit fighting the ACA, and the Evers administration has instead heavily promoted the program, including the creation of a health coverage information program and website, WisCovered, a joint project of the state’s insurance and health departments.

With President Donald Trump returning to the White House, however, the ACA’s future has been uncertain. Trump tried unsuccessfully to abolish the program in his first term in office, and during the 2024 campaign said he would replace it, but has never offered a clear alternative plan.

In a statement, Evers cited the increased popularity of the ACA as a reason to ensure it remains intact.

“Health care should not be a privilege only afforded to the healthy and the wealthy, and the Affordable Care Act has been transformational for millions, including Wisconsinites who have pre-existing conditions,” Evers said. “This record enrollment proves just how important it is that we continue to defend and protect access to healthcare, close our uninsured gap, and support programs that help make a real difference in the lives of folks and families across our state.”

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U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) points to a wall where he has posted printouts listing the budget line items of all the programs reportedly frozen this week after a memo was issued by the Trump administration. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

This week’s drama over a federal funding freeze is the precursor to a battle in April over federal tax cuts that Democrats are bracing for, according to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan.

The Wisconsin Democrat met with reporters Thursday, with most of the session focusing on the move by President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this week to suspend the disbursement of federal grant and loan funds.

Even with a federal court order that’s supposed to be blocking the suspension, Pocan said his office and those of his congressional colleagues are hearing from constituents who have been locked out of funding or are worried about its impact on them.

“We’re getting these calls right now — lots and lots of calls,” Pocan said, including from nonprofits that worry they might have to shut down and from funding recipients who have been shut out from online portals through which they’re supposed to receive payments.

“Even though we’re told it’s not happening, it is happening, and they can’t get the funds that they’re [expecting],” Pocan said.

Pocan, whose district includes Wisconsin’s capital, prepped for the media session by filling a conference room wall in his Madison office with printouts of budget line items affected by the Trump administration’s suspension. He said he got the list of items from a New York Times report.

“When he said he was going to freeze funding to 2,600 different federal lines, that’s what’s [on] the wall right there,” Pocan said.

“We’re getting calls from university researchers” worried about National Institutes of Health grants being frozen, he said. “And if you disrupt research in the middle of it, you’ve lost all the money that you put into some of that research.”

His office has heard from a wide range of other federal funds recipients.

“We’re getting K-12 schools who are still going to lose money for their lunch programs, worried about what they’re going to do — and this is for kids who often this is the only meal that they’re getting during the day,” Pocan said.

Also on the list, he said, are funds that include rural broadband projects, disaster aid, the Small Business Administration and a USDA dairy innovation project — one that Pocan said had bipartisan support from two Wisconsin lawmakers, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

How the suspension unfolded echoed what Trump said this past summer, “when he talked in the debate about having a concept of a plan of health care,” Pocan said. “I think pretty much that’s how he operates — he doesn’t have plans, but he has concepts of plans, which often don’t execute.”

At the same time, though, he said the details reflected Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document that circulated last year as a blueprint for a second Trump term, even though Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

“If you have any question of what they might do, I would look at Project 2025,” Pocan said. “It’s very clear that that is the guiding document for much of what they’re doing.”

Beyond the current turmoil, however, Pocan, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the episode foreshadows what Democratic congressional leaders expect will be a major budget  bill in April. They foresee legislation that will extend and magnify the tax cuts that Trump and Congress enacted in 2017, during the president’s first term, and the broad swath of programs caught up in the suspension would be the price, he said.

“This is setting up the cuts for getting funding to give a tax break to those who can afford to go to Mar-A-Lago and the billionaires that were attending the inaugural and all the tech folks,” Pocan said.

“Part of it is just this awful idea that you’re going to cut things that help real people to the degree that you need to” to pay for extending the 2017 tax cuts, he added, pegging the estimate at $4 trillion.

“It would take that, plus they’re talking about lowering the corporate tax rate and a whole lot of other things,” Pocan said. “But everything that’s here is affecting people in the district and across the country for the most part.”

He predicted that the impact wouldn’t be limited to people who don’t support the president. “I guarantee there’s a lot of people who are Trump voters who are going to be very negatively impacted by the cuts that he wants to do in order to give Elon Musk a tax break,” he said.

Congressional Democrats are mapping a three-part response — “litigation, communication — talking about what’s here — and the appropriations process,” Pocan said. “We will probably be doing a lot to highlight this.”

He expects that to be a “the determinative vote for Congress coming up in the Trump administration,” Pocan said. “Because if you vote for a reconciliation bill, it has a giant tax break, and you’re taking that money from lower income folks and people of average income in the district by cutting programs like this.”

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Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn questions an attorney during oral arguments in January 2025. (Screenshot/WisEye)

A Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who helped write Act 10 recused himself Thursday as the high court signaled it was preparing to take up a legal challenge to the 2011 law limiting public employees’ collective bargaining rights.

After a Dane County judge struck down Act 10 in December, the plaintiffs — a teachers union — filed a motion with the state Supreme Court to bypass the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and take up the case directly. 

On Thursday, the Court issued an order related to that motion, granting a request from Republican leaders of the state Legislature to intervene and file a response to the bypass request. The Court set a Feb. 5 deadline for the response. 

Along with Thursday’s order, Justice Brian Hagedorn issued an order recusing himself from taking part in the case. Hagedorn previously served as legal counsel to Republican Gov. Scott Walker and helped draft the bill that became Act 10, then defended it against a federal court challenge. 

In December, a Dane County judge ruled that parts of the law are unconstitutional because it treats similar types of state employees differently. The law retained collective bargaining rights for police officers, but excluded the state Capitol Police officers, conservation wardens and correctional officers. 

“Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines ‘public safety employee,’” Judge Jacob Frost wrote. “It is that definition which is unconstitutional.”

In his recusal order Thursday, Hagedorn acknowledged his role in shaping and defending the law. 

“Members of the judiciary take a solemn oath to be independent and impartial,” Hagedorn wrote. “Our duty is to call it straight in every case, with neither partiality nor prejudice toward anyone. The law must guide our decisions — not politics, tribalism, or personal policy views.” 

“After reviewing the filings and the various ethical rules I am sworn to uphold, I have concluded that the law requires me to recuse from this case,” he continued. “The issues raised involve matters for which I provided legal counsel in both the initial crafting and later defense of Act 10, including in a case raising nearly identical claims under the federal constitution.”

Hagedorn also noted that many of the legal arguments in the current challenge are similar to those made in the 2011 federal case. 

Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who had previously said she may recuse herself from an Act 10 case because she participated in protests against the legislation as it was pending, did not participate in the decision to accept the case, but she did not release an order saying she’d recuse herself. 

Both Hagedorn and Protasiewicz had faced calls for recusal in the case. Protasiewicz had also faced threats of impeachment from Republican legislators in a previous case about the state’s legislative maps. 

In his order, Hagedorn warned about the politicization of the recusal process.

“In my view, recusal on this court should be rare — done only when the law requires it,” he wrote. “Going beyond that can create problems. We have seen how recusal can be weaponized by parties seeking a litigation advantage.”

In response to the Court’s order Thursday on the Legislature’s petition to intervene, Justice Rebecca Bradley and Chief Justice Annette Ziegler dissented. 

They, along with Hagedorn, have also dissented in several Supreme Court decisions to bypass lower courts and take up cases after the court’s majority flipped in 2023 from four conservative justices to four liberal ones.

Bradley, writing Thursday’s dissent, pointed out that the state Legislature had asked for a two-week extension to respond to the bypass petition, and was instead given three business days. 

“There is absolutely no reason to deny the Legislature’s request, unless three members of this court wish to fast track yet another politically charged case for the purpose of overturning settled law on an issue already decided by this court eleven years ago,” Bradley wrote.

The dispute over Act 10 is set to play a major role in this April’s Supreme Court election between Dane County Judge Susan Crawford and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who was state attorney general during Walker’s second term.

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Then-President Joe Biden visited Milwaukee in October 2024 to announced a new rule requiring the replacement of all lead water pipes in the U.S. by 2037. On Wednesday, Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Wisconsin is joining nine other states and D.C. to defend the rule. (Oct. 8, 2024 screenshot/White House livestream)

Wisconsin has joined with nine other states and the District of Columbia to defend the federal lead and copper water rule that took effect Dec. 30, tightening standards for lead exposure and requiring water systems across the county to replace lead pipes by 2037.

The new rule, which then-President Joe Biden announced in Milwaukee in October, has been challenged by the American Water Works Association, a trade group for water and wastewater utilities.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice announced Wednesday the state was joining the legal effort to intervene in the lawsuit in support of the rule. Other states in the coalition are California, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and North Carolina, along with D.C.

“Reducing lead in our drinking water shouldn’t be controversial,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said. “This common-sense rule that helps protect people’s health should remain in place.”

Lead exposure has been identified as a health hazard, especially for children, and has been linked to premature birth, damage during brain development and learning disabilities, delayed physical development in children and cardiovascular and kidney problems in adults. No amount of lead in drinking water is safe, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

On Tuesday, Gov. Tony Evers approved an emergency rule from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) to lower the threshold for lead poisoning to 3.5 micrograms per deciliter. The change makes more children and families eligible for intervention to diagnose and treat lead poisoning.

Evers has announced plans to seek a $6.2 million increase for local health departments, some of that to address lead poisoning, in the 2025-27 state budget that he will release in February.

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Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer, speaks Tuesday at a press conference about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. With him are, from left, Sam Liebert of All Voting is Local and Nick Ramos of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

A former U.S. Capitol Police officer who survived the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack said Tuesday the insurrection must not be forgotten four years later — and candidates running for election now should face up to what happened then.

“This attempt to whitewash, downplay, normalize what happened on Jan. 6 is ongoing and shows no signs of letting up,” said Harry Dunn during a meeting with reporters in Madison.

Criticizing Republicans who have urged Democrats and the public “to move on from Jan. 6,” Dunn said the attack met the definition of an insurrection — “a violent uprising against the government. Full stop.”

“That’s what Jan. 6 was,” he added. “The police officers just happened to be in the way. But anybody that fails to accept that, acknowledge that for what that was, deserves to be called out, condemned.”

Pro-democracy advocates arranged for Dunn to speak to the press in the state Capitol building and deliberately chose one particular meeting room on the third floor — 300 South, the same room used by Republican fake electors in December 2020 who filled out false electoral votes choosing Donald Trump as the Wisconsin winner of an election that he lost.

The fake elector scheme “was hatched in Wisconsin and launched from here to the rest of the United States,” said Scott Thompson, a staff attorney for Law Forward, at Tuesday’s press conference.

The nonprofit law firm sued Wisconsin’s fake electors and won a settlement in which they acknowledged in writing they had tried “to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential elections results.” The scheme culminated in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, Thompson said.  

“The events of Jan. 6, 2021, were not just an attack on a building or a single moment in time, but they were an attack on our collective voice as voters,” said Sam Liebert, Wisconsin director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local Action. “The insurrection was a brazen and egregious attempt to silence millions of Americans nationwide to overturn the results of a free and fair election through violence and intimidation.”

Four years later in 2024 Trump won the U.S. popular vote, including a 30,000-vote majority in Wisconsin, returning him to the White House effective Jan. 20. There one of his first acts was to pardon more than 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6 attack.

Dunn’s visit to Wisconsin focused on Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel’s comments about the Jan. 6 defendants, including during a recent radio interview. Schimel is a Waukesha County circuit court judge and former Wisconsin attorney general.

In a Jan. 2 appearance on the Vicki McKenna show, Schimel said that Jan. 6 defendants didn’t have “a fair shot” when they were tried and blamed “lawfare manipulation” for the conviction of defendants in the attack.

Schimel suggested they would have been acquitted had they not been put on trial in “overwhelmingly liberal” Washington, D.C., and that the prosecutors appointed under the Democratic administration “would never take their prosecution in a district where you had a fair shot as a defendant.”

The federal government prosecuted the rioters in Washington because the city is where the U.S. Capitol is located.

Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, mentioned Schimel’s radio interview before introducing Dunn.

“Four years ago, far-right mobs swarmed the Capitol, assaulted officers and tried to overturn the will of voters,” said Ramos. “It’s pretty straightforward, and yet Schimel, our former attorney general, still thinks these people weren’t given a fair shot and their trials were political gamesmanship.”

Dunn said he’s taken an interest in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race because of Schimel’s comments.

“I’ve been fighting for accountability from day one,” Dunn said. He holds Donald Trump primarily responsible for the riot.

“That accountability won’t happen,” he said. But he added that he also wants to hold accountable “public officials who believe that Donald Trump’s pardoning of these individuals was OK” — including Schimel.

“I don’t know Brad Schimel’s positions on policy on anything else, except for that he is OK with supporting the rioters who attacked me and my coworkers, period,” Dunn said. “And that is not OK — and that’s what’s bringing me here.”

During a news conference Monday featuring his endorsement by Wisconsin Republican members of Congress, Schimel accused prosecutors of overcharging some Jan. 6 defendants until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law under which they were charged didn’t apply to them.

He also said that “anyone who engaged in violence and Jan. 6, assaulted a police officer, resisted arrest, those people should have been prosecuted … and judges should impose sentences that are just under the circumstances.”

Schimel also defended the president’s power to issue pardons: “It’s a power they have. I don’t object to them utilizing that.”

Dunn was asked Tuesday about Schimel’s comments.

“If you believe that the individuals who attacked police officers should serve their sentence, then the only response to Donald Trump’s pardons should be that they’re wrong,” Dunn replied. “He should not pardon them — and those words did not come out of [Schimel’s] mouth. So he’s attempting to play both sides.”

In an interview, Dunn said he’s kept going despite disappointment at Trump’s 2024 victory because “I believe in doing what’s right.”

That’s what led him to become a police officer, he said, and after the Capitol attack, to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Congress. He also has a political action committee, raising funds to support political candidates who are pro-democracy, he said.

Dunn acknowledged that some who opposed the president have given up in despair while others have become embittered toward Trump voters.

“I’ve seen people say, ‘You know what? This is what you all voted for. You get what you deserve,’” he said. “There are a lot of people who did not vote for this, that are going to be impacted by the things that Donald Trump and this administration are going to do, and I believe they deserve somebody that’s going to fight for them.”

There will be elections this year, in 2026 and 2028, all opportunities for change, “so I encourage people,” Dunn said. “And I think part of my work is to make sure people are educated before Election Day and not outraged after Election Day.”

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State Sen. Kelda Roys speaks with reporters Tuesday about the Trump administration's memo announcing a suspension of federal funds directed to state and local governments. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin joined 21 states and the District of Columbia Tuesday in a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from cutting off the distribution of budgeted federal funds to states and local governments.

A federal district judge ruled Tuesday the Trump administration must wait until at least next week before it can move forward with pausing federal spending on trillions in grants and loans, though she emphasized the short-term administrative stay might not continue after a Feb. 3 hearing.

District Judge Loren L. AliKhan’s decision temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget from moving forward with plans to stop payments on multiple federal programs, which it announced late Monday.

The White House action “would immediately jeopardize critical federal benefits and investments that provide crucial health and childcare services, support public schools, combat hate crimes and violence against women, and provide life-saving disaster relief to states, among other critical programs,” the office of Gov. Tony Evers said in announcing the lawsuit late Tuesday.

Wisconsin expects to receive $28.2 billion in federal funds appropriated for the current 2023-25 two-year budget period, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

“This was a sweeping, reckless decision that has caused unnecessary chaos and panic in Wisconsin and across our country,” Evers said in announcing the lawsuit. “Wisconsin’s kids, families, veterans, law enforcement, seniors, and Wisconsinites in every corner of our state depend upon our federal tax dollars to support basic, everyday needs and services.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said the funding freeze appears to include money for law enforcement, victim services, health programs, infrastructure projects, education and additional purposes.

It “has already resulted in widespread uncertainty and confusion,” Kaul said. “This misguided and unlawful policy must be blocked before it leads to substantial harm to services and programs that are critical for Wisconsinites.”

Reaction to the Trump administration action was widespread, and state as well as federal lawmakers said they were starting to hear from constituents worried about the impact on programs and services they relied on.

“I am already hearing from my constituents who are worried about funding being cut off for cops and firefighters, child care, combatting the fentanyl crisis, food for kids, and so much more,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), vowing to fight action. “Democrats and Republicans passed laws providing this funding for our kids, families, and communities, and ripping it away is an unconstitutional power grab.”

In a brief press conference in her state Capitol office, Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) called the funding suspension an “illegal power grab that the Trump administration is attempting to pull” and warned of “the very real cost that that’s going to have for Wisconsin families and families across America.”

Roys said the action was “a stunt” by Trump. “It’s a way to try to see how far he can go, how much he can get away with, and to test the loyalty of all the GOP politicians that he thinks should bend the knee,” she said. “And that should not distract us from the fact that this is going to have very, very real negative consequences for millions of families in our state, right here and across the country.”

She added the action is also “a very destabilizing move that could have significant ramifications for people’s sense of economic security” and a potential “shock to the economy.”

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan described the administration’s action as an “unprecedented and unconstitutional stop-payment on Congressionally appropriated funding” and attacked Trump as “the Grifter-in-Chief” who was violating the Constitution by imposing the freeze.

Pocan connected the action with Trump’s proposals for renewing tax cuts enacted in 2017, accusing the president of “working to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies.”

“This reckless move will devastate every community across the country, and Republicans must join with Democrats to make sure Trump does not get away with this unconstitutional theft of American taxpayers’ own money,” Pocan said.

Earlier Tuesday, Evers sent Trump a letter urging him to reverse the plan to cut off federal assistance, warning that it “could have disastrous consequences for the people of Wisconsin and our state.”

He wrote that the freeze would withhold “tax dollars from Wisconsin that were already approved by the U.S. Congress” and thus that they “are the law.”

“I urge you to please follow the law and reconsider this decision,” Evers concluded.

 

Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

The members of Wisconsin’s Republican congressional delegation formally endorsed Brad Schimel in the April Wisconsin Supreme Court election Monday in a virtual news conference that highlighted Schimel’s campaign talking points.

Schimel, a Waukesha County circuit judge and former one-term state attorney general, is running for an open seat on the court against Susan Crawford, a Dane County circuit judge.

Elections for the state Supreme Court are officially nonpartisan, but they’ve become partisan in all but name over the last couple of decades, with both major parties supporting candidates. While Schimel’s announcement Monday touted the backing of congressional Republicans, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and other key Democratic leaders have endorsed Crawford.

The race to replace retiring Justice Ann Walsh Bradley will determine whether the Court’s four-member liberal majority remains or falls to a new four-member conservative majority. 

At the Monday morning news conference U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Prairie du Chien) said the Wisconsin voters who helped carry Donald Trump to a second term as U.S. president in November would do the same for Schimel in April.

“They’re sick and tired of the radical left agenda,” Van Orden said. “They want to make sure that someone that is sitting on the court is interpreting the law, not writing the law.”

Among the questions from reporters on the call was one about Schimel’s past statements on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president in 2020.

During a talk radio show broadcast on Jan. 2, Schimel charged that the prosecution of the Jan. 6 defendants in Washington, D.C. — where the Capitol is located and the attack took place — was the result of political “manipulation” by Democrats because the population of the city “is overwhelmingly liberal.”

“They would never take their prosecution in a district where you had a fair shot as a defendant,” Schimel told radio host Vicki McKenna.

During Monday’s news conference, a member of Schimel’s campaign staff relayed a reporter’s question that began with a reference to a former U.S. Capitol Police officer “who is coming to Wisconsin tomorrow to criticize your comments about the defendants in those cases.”

The question didn’t specify Schimel’s comments or their context, but asked what he  thought “of the Trump pardons for Jan. 6 protesters who assaulted law enforcement officers.”

“I have no idea what comments you are talking about,” Schimel replied, adding, “I’ve said that anyone who engaged in violence and Jan. 6, assaulted a police officer, resisted arrest, those people should have been prosecuted. They should be prosecuted and held accountable, and judges should impose sentences that are just under the circumstances.”

But Schimel also criticized the use of a federal law against election obstruction to lodge felony charges against some of those who had broken into the Capitol that day. He said it took the U.S. Supreme Court to “finally recognize that prosecutors in Washington, D.C., overreached.” The Court vacated those convictions.

In addition, he voiced support for a president’s right to pardon offenders. “It’s a power they have,” Schimel said. “I don’t object to them utilizing that power.”

The news conference signaled that Schimel’s campaign is focusing on, among other subjects, Wisconsin’s 2011 law requiring voters to show a picture ID when they go to the polls. 

Republican lawmakers have proposed an amendment that would  enshrine the requirement in the state constitution. That proposal goes before voters on the April ballot — alongside the Supreme Court race. Republicans argue that the state Supreme Court might otherwise overturn the law.  

Schimel also raised the circuit court decision, now under appeal, that would overturn the 2011 law known as Act 10 sharply restricting collective bargaining for public employees.

As an attorney, Crawford represented clients who sought to overturn the state’s Voter ID law as well as Act 10.

“She advocated, she fought against and tried to overturn Wisconsin’s Voter ID law,” Sen. Ron Johnson said. “It’s such a huge difference between conservative judges, people like Brad Schimel, who will apply the law faithfully — again, not what his policy preferences are, but respect not only our state constitution, but the federal constitution in the separation of powers, the checks and balances and being a judge, not a super legislator.”

Schimel noted Crawford’s work as a lawyer opposing Act 10 in a case that the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority at the time, rejected.

“This has been settled law for over a decade, but it’s coming right back,” he said. “If my opponent wins, does anyone believe a case, a law, like Act 10 has any chance of a fair, objective examination?”

Asked what his standard would be for recusing himself from ruling on a case, Schimel said that would include “any case where my family, I or my family, my immediate family, have a personal stake, win or lose, in that case.” He said he would “perhaps … need to recuse” himself on issues with which “I was directly involved in the past” or that “I took strong positions on” — but added that “it’s hard to predict what that might be in a vacuum like this.”

On Monday, however, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin accused Schimel of prejudging the issue of abortion rights. The party highlighted a New York Times report on the race that included references to his opposition to abortion rights and his work as attorney general in helping to “map out a strategy to restrict abortion rights.”

The Times article quoted Schimel telling supporters during a campaign stop this past summer that he supported Wisconsin’s 1849 law that was thought to ban abortion until a December 2023 circuit court decision declared that it did not. That ruling is now under appeal and the case is likely to go before the state Supreme Court, possibly this year.

“There is not a constitutional right to abortion in our State Constitution,” The Times quoted Schimel telling supporters in Chilton. “That will be a sham if they find that.”

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court will take up a dispute over funding a state initiative to improve reading instruction. (FangXiaNuo/Getty photo)

A legal battle over $50 million to fund a new Wisconsin reading initiative will go directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a majority of justices on the Court has decided.

The Court on Friday accepted a petition from Gov. Tony Evers and the state Department of Public Instruction to bypass the state appeals court in a lawsuit about the funding.

The $50 million was set aside in the 2023-25 budget for the new reading program, which was authorized in a separate bill in July 2023.

The Legislature passed a follow-up measure in early 2024 described as creating “a mechanism” for the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to deploy the money. Evers signed that bill, Act 100, but with a partial veto, saying he was removing language that overly complicated how the money was spent as well as language providing per-pupil increases to private choice and independent charter schools.

The finance committee has so far declined to release the $50 million.

Republican leaders of the Legislature sued the governor, arguing that Act 100 wasn’t an appropriations law subject to the partial veto. Evers, a Democrat, countersued, charging that the finance committee was acting unlawfully in refusing to release the money.

In Dane County Circuit Court, Judge Stephen Elke issued a summary judgment Aug. 27, 2024, rejecting both lawsuits: Act 100 is an appropriations law, permitting the governor to exercise partial veto power, he ruled, while the $50 million was “properly appropriated” to the finance committee, not directly to DPI.

Attorneys for both the Evers administration and the Legislature appealed to the Wisconsin Appeals Court District 4, but Evers and DPI subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court to bypass the appeals court.  

On Friday, the high court granted the petition. The Court doesn’t typically express its reasoning when accepting a bypass petition, and the authors of Friday’s order didn’t do so, either.

Justice Rebecca Bradley and Chief Justice Annette Ziegler dissented, with Bradley arguing that the Court majority’s decision to take the case was premature. 

“The members of the majority sometimes enforce a rule against ‘premature petitions’ but sometimes they don’t, without disclosing any standards by which they will choose whether to apply it,” Bradley wrote. “Such arbitrariness by courts is antithetical to the original understanding of the judicial role.”

Justice Brian Hagedorn filed a separate dissent, stating, “Consistent with past practice, I would deny the petition for bypass as premature.”

This report has been updated to include an additional dissent filed with the decision. 

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