Kristen Crowell, executive director of Fair Share America, speaks Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., the first stop for Fair Share America's bus campaign to oppose the Republican budget reconciliation bill currently in the U.S. Senate. (Photo courtesy of Fair Share America)

Over the next three weeks, a band of advocates in a bright green bus is traveling across the U.S. with a message aimed at members of Congress — and at the voters who live in their districts.

To the voters, the message is that they will be hurt by the Republican mega-bill taking shape in Washington — a bill that would extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 that primarily benefit the wealthy and pay for them by slashing Medicaid and other federal programs that critics of the measure argue broadly benefit the public.

To U.S. senators and representatives, the message is: Vote against the measure, or face the wrath of voters in 2026.

The bus trip was launched by  Fair Share America, a coalition of groups focused on  beating back attempts to extend the 2017 tax cuts, one of the signature pieces of legislation from President Donald Trump’s first term. The organization is made up of unions, organizations favoring progressive taxation, and progressive social justice and policy groups.

Fair Share America’s executive director is Kristen Crowell, who lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. In 2022 she helped lead a campaign in Massachusetts when voters approved a constitutional amendment that created a 4% surtax on earned income over $1 million.

“That increase is now generating $3 billion annually that is dedicated for education and transportation,” Crowell told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The Boston Globe reported that the campaign to pass the Massachusetts “millionaires’ tax” raised $27 million, nearly twice as much as the $14 million raised by business-backed opponents of the measure. Crowell said the campaign succeeded by appealing to voters on the issue of fairness.

“We know that when we ask the wealthy to pay a little bit more, to pay their fair share, we can fund the investments that our neighbors and families and communities deserve — and really importantly, right now in this moment, they need in order to to get ahead,” Crowell said in an interview.

Opposition group launched in 2024

The 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of this year. With that date on the calendar, Fair Share America launched in September 2024 to oppose renewing them.

“We started organizing before we knew the outcome of the election and were handed a different reality than we might have hoped for,” Crowell said.

Since then, the organization has helped “lead the pushback at the state level to make sure that constituents and the public understand what’s happening behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., and to really bring the fight to key districts and geographies across the country where lawmakers, in particular the GOP members of Congress, have shut out their constituents,” she said.

The bus trip started on Saturday in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., stopped in Philadelphia on Sunday and will hit four more cities across Pennsylvania on Monday. Stops in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa follow. After that, the bus will double back on its route for three Wisconsin stops, in Racine and Oshkosh on Monday, June 30, and La Crosse on July 1.

The schedule will continue through the middle of July, stopping in Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada before concluding in Bakersfield, California on July 14.

The tour isn’t the start of the organization’s campaign. Fair Share America and its partners with other advocacy groups have been holding town hall meetings in 33 states across the country, Crowell said — including one in Racine in April that featured former Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Crowell was at the Racine event, to which the local member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) was invited but didn’t show up. “Over 200 people came [from] across the political spectrum.” Crowell said.

At that town hall and other such events across the country, she’s seen energetic opposition to the new Trump administration as well as the priorities of the current Congress, she said.

“Fair Share America’s not speaking to one side of the aisle vs. the other,” Crowell said. “This is a populist moment.”

Public opposition to budget bill

A poll on behalf of three of the coalition’s member groups found that even before they were given information about details of the GOP budget reconciliation bill, the American voters surveyed had a negative opinion of it.

According to the pollsters 38% of those surveyed said they support the bill, 46% said they oppose it and 16% said they don’t know enough to have an opinion.

Fewer than one-third of voters surveyed — 30% — have heard a lot about the bill. Another 40% have heard “just some” about it, and the remaining 30% said they’ve heard little or nothing about the measure.

The more people heard, however, the less they liked it, according to the report from the polling firm, Hart Research. Opposition increased among all groups after pollsters told people about various details — its changes to Medicaid and to SNAP federal nutrition aid, for example.

“By being in the rooms and town halls and knocking on doors here in Wisconsin, that is what we are hearing and seeing,” Crowell said.

With its slogan, “Stop the billionaire giveaway,” Fair Share America’s bus tour aims to amplify the bill’s cuts to programs that benefit the public and to center the message that its tax cuts favor the wealthy.

Congressional Republicans “have not engaged with their constituents” in Wisconsin and elsewhere about the reconciliation bill, Crowell said. Fair Share America’s goal is to break down the details in terms that people will understand and respond to.

“When you tell them what’s at stake, what’s coming down, they are furious and they want to know how to get in the fight,” Crowell said. “They want to know how to organize their three or four neighbors. So it is incumbent on all of us to shed light on the horrors of this reconciliation bill and do everything it takes to get the word out.”

Funding values and priorities

In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has said he opposes the bill and has threatened to vote against it, criticizing it for not making deeper federal spending cuts. 

While that’s the opposite of Fair Share America’s agenda, “voting ‘No’ is voting ‘No’ at the end of the day,” Crowell said.

She is skeptical that Johnson will follow through on his threat, however.

“When push comes to shove, I don’t think Sen. Johnson is going to cross the White House or cross GOP leadership. I expect him to fall in line,” she said. “But we’re here to push back and say, ‘Absolutely not. We will hold you to that No vote and we do want you to understand what the stakes are for your constituents.’”

While the campaign’s goal is to stop the bill, there’s a second message regardless of the outcome, Crowell said.

“We are building a movement that is strong and durable and it crosses partisan lines,” she said. “If they in fact do go ahead and pass this, there will be hell to pay for those members who abandoned  and threw their constituents and their communities under the bus.”

Crowell said her more than two decades of activism started when, as a working mother, she opposed Milwaukee public school budget cuts. Her daughter, who was in kindergarten then, is now 29.

She went on to organize with “We Are Wisconsin,” the grass-roots coalition that sprang up in reaction to Act 10 — the 2011 law stripping most collective bargaining rights from most public employees, introduced and signed by Scott Walker in his first term as governor.

Act 10 was billed as a “budget repair bill.” Crowell said that working against it she saw clearly the connection between government budgets and policy.

“If progressives want to really win … and fund the things that we care about, we have to compete for what happens in the budget process,” Crowell said. “We have to compete for a fair and just tax code. We have to compete for the revenue that funds all of the issues that we care about, whether that’s health care or climate or education or child care.”

A budget “can be used either to fund our priorities and reflect our values or attack the things that we deeply care about,” Crowell said. With the federal budget reconciliation bill, “we’re watching the GOP members of Congress do exactly that — looking to further harm our communities through advancing this budget.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

A growing memorial for Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband stands Monday, June 16, 2025 at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

The horrific assassination of Minnesota’s Democratic legislative leader Melissa Hortman last weekend left people across the country in a state of shock and grief. 

But just across the border from Hortman’s home state, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden seized on the double murder of Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were shot dead in their home, and the near-fatal shootings of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, to mock Democrats and try to score political points. Van Orden falsely characterized the suspected shooter, a right-wing religious fanatic on a mission to murder Democrats and abortion providers, as an anti-Trump protester who “decided to murder and attempt to murder some politicians that were not far Left enough for them.”

This wildly misleading analysis came straight out of the MAGA alternative reality machine on social media, where, Minnesota Reformer editor J. Patrick Coolican wrote, right-wing influencers began peddling misinformation about Hortman’s murder just hours after it happened. 

Van Orden was not alone in helping to spread those lies. Wisconsin’s former Republican Gov. Scott Walker also did his part. In a now-deleted post on X, Walker wrote that if the assassination “ends up being done by an ultra-liberal activist … watch for many on the left to be silent or even justify it. Wrong!” 

It is now clear that suspected murderer Boelter was a Republican who, as an evangelical Christian minister, gave sermons railing against abortion and LGBTQ people. Walker at least had the good sense to take down his post — lapsing into the silence he’d predicted “many on the left” would observe. 

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah was shamed by his colleagues into taking down a similarly callous post in which he blamed “Marxists” for the murders and appeared to gloat that it was a “nightmare” for Walz. 

Van Orden, on the other hand, doubled down.

“I stand by my statement,” he wrote on X after U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan chastized him for replying to Walz’s remembrance of Hortman by saying that the Democratic governor is “stupid” and a “clown.” Van Orden responded to Pocan with an obscenity. That’s the post he stood by.

Van Orden, who attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election alongside the Capitol insurrectionists, is hardly a model of statesmanship. His boorish behavior in Washington on more than one occasion has embarrassed our state.

But there’s something more troubling going on here than one politician’s loutish behavior. 

The horrifying political assassination in Minnesota is a direct result of the same MAGA disinformation machine that went into overdrive trying to distort the truth about the assassin’s aims. Van Orden is one of many Republicans who have hyped the idea that the U.S. is under attack from “criminal, illegal aliens” who were allowed by the Biden administration to “wander around the nation at their leisure.” (In fact, immigrants commit violent crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, and Van Orden’s district is full of hardworking immigrants who lack legal status but without whom Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse.)

Republicans following Trump’s lead have stirred up a moral panic around immigration, abortion, LGBTQ people and other non-threats in increasingly hysterical terms. Their rhetoric laid the groundwork for actual physical violence. It has been used to justify the unprecedented spectacle of masked federal agents seizing people on U.S. streets and deporting them without due process, as well as the Trump administration’s outrageous manhandling and handcuffing of Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee, Sen. Alex Padilla in California and a mayoral candidate and Comptroller Brad Lander in New York City.  

Trump’s invitation to physical violence against his opponents and the press are a hit with his base. It seems inevitable that eventually someone would take him up on it. 

Adding fuel to the fire, Trump’s MAGA minions have made his sociopathic callousness part of their brand. Trump refused to call Walz after the murders in Minnesota, and instead took a gratuitous swipe at the man who campaigned against him as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, calling him “whacked out” and “a mess.”

 “I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump told reporters. 

In a terse statement, Walz spokesperson Teddy Tschann explained why: “Governor Walz wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the governor remains focused on helping all three to heal.”

What happened in Minnesota is a tragedy for all of us. It’s made worse by the lack of leadership from politicians who not only don’t have the wisdom and maturity to respond appropriately, but who, by failing to take responsibility for their actions, are actively propelling us toward a more terrible future.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A unanimous Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with the Democratic state attorney general Tuesday in a long-running battle over a law passed by Republicans who wanted to weaken the office in a lame duck legislative session more than six years ago.

The court ruled 7-0 that requiring the attorney general to get permission from a Republican-controlled legislative committee to settle certain civil lawsuits was unconstitutional. The law is a separation of powers violation, the court said.

The Republican-controlled Legislature convened a session in December 2018 after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul defeated Republican incumbents. The laws signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker on his way out the door weakened powers of both offices.

At issue in the case decided Tuesday was the attorney general’s power to settle civil lawsuits involving environmental and consumer protection cases as well as cases involving the governor’s office and executive branch. The new law required the Legislature’s budget committee, which is controlled by Republicans, to sign off on those settlements.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020, when controlled by conservatives, upheld all of the lame duck laws and ruled they did not violate the separation of powers principle. But the ruling left the door open to future challenges on how the laws are applied.

Kaul sued that year, arguing that having to seek approval for those lawsuit settlements violates the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. The Legislature argued that lawmakers have an interest in overseeing the settlement of lawsuits and that the court’s earlier ruling saying there was no separation of powers violation should stand.

Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, who won election to the state Supreme Court in April and will be joining the court in August, ruled in favor of Kaul in 2022, saying the law was unconstitutional. A state appeals court overturned her ruling December, saying there was no separation of powers violation because both the executive and legislative branches of government share the powers in question.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the Legislature cannot “assume for itself the power to execute a law it wrote.”

There is no constitutional justification for requiring the Legislature’s budget committee to sign off on court settlements at issue in the case, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the court.

Kaul praised the ruling, saying in a statement that the decision “finally puts an end to the legislature’s unconstitutional involvement in the resolution of key categories of cases.”

Republican legislative leaders who defended the law had no immediate comment Tuesday.

The win for Kaul comes as Evers has been unsuccessful in overturning numerous law changes affecting the power of the governor. He’s proposed undoing the laws in all four state budgets he’s proposed, and courts have upheld the laws when challenged.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down GOP law weakening attorney general’s power is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.