The Wisconsin State Legislature is being sued over its use of private lawyers by progressive firm Law Forward. The State Capitol (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
The Wisconsin State Legislature is being sued over its use of private lawyers by progressive firm Law Forward. The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 19 in Dane County Circuit Court, takes aim at a provision in the lame duck law passed by the Republican majority and signed by outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018 before Democratic Gov. Tony Evers took office for his first term. The provision allows the Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader to obtain outside legal counsel.
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation published in July 2025 found that since 2017 lawmakers had spent over $26 million in taxpayer money on legal fees to private law firms, many of which had ties to the national Republican party and the state DOJ under former Republican state attorneys general.
Law Forward President and General Counsel Jeff Mandell said in a statement that Wisconsinites “deserve to know their money is being spent lawfully to advance a valid public purpose.”
“This lawsuit challenges the tens of millions in taxpayer funds, most of which is wasted by the Republican-controlled Legislature on private legal counsel in pursuit of private interests, in clear violation of the Wisconsin Constitution’s public purpose doctrine and Wisconsin’s system of divided government,” Mandell said.
The lawsuit argues that the retention of private lawyers using public funds is unconstitutional because it is duplicative of the legal services provided through the Department of Justice that the state already pays for and has been used primarily for private, partisan or political interests.
The Wisconsin Constitution prohibits spending public funds for purposes that aren’t public.
It asks the court to declare the use of private counsel unconstitutional and to block the state Department of Administration from processing future payments for private counsel for lawmakers.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three Wisconsin taxpayers: Daniel Theno, a Brown County Board Supervisor and former state senator, Randy Scannell, a former Green Bay City Council alderman, and J. Drew Ryberg.
The defendants named in the suit include the Assembly, Senate, and the Department of Administration (DOA) as well as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) and other legislative leaders.
“The Legislature hires attorneys to defend Wisconsin’s laws because the people of Wisconsin deserve a rigorous defense of the laws on the books. Even though the Attorney General can defend our laws, we have seen that the Department of Justice is unable to put politics aside on partisan issues,” Lemahieu and Vos said in a joint statement. “Hiring outside counsel simply allows the legislature to ensure all sides are presented vigorously so the judiciary can hear all points of view to make the best decision.”
One case that the lawsuit cites is Wisconsin State Senate v. City of Green Bay. The case, which was settled in July 2024, centered on the City of Green Bay and Mayor Eric Genrich alleging that audio recording devices installed in City Hall in 2021 violated state electronic surveillance laws.
The Senate and its member, Sen. André Jacque (R-New Franken), initially brought the case, but the Senate was dismissed as a party after it was filed. The Law Forward suit alleges that the Senate continued paying for private counsel “with bills sometimes exceeding $150,000 in a month” and argues the Senate and Jacque “initiated and persisted in litigation for no discernable public purpose.”
Another case cited is the hiring of Michael Gableman by Vos in 2021 to investigate Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential results, which Trump falsely claimed had been rigged to cause his loss. The Assembly paid Gableman over $1.3 million in public dollars for Gableman, other staff and expenses until August 2022 when Gableman was fired.
Referencing a statement made by Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) after the ordeal, the lawsuit argues that “‘nothing’ actually overstates the value to the people of Wisconsin of the services rendered” and that Gableman’s efforts “led to a bevy of litigation, in multiple circuit and appellate courts.” The lawsuit also claims that afterwards the Assembly hired outside counsel to represent Gableman and sometimes the Assembly in circuit and appellate courts in litigation that was the result of the investigation.
The lawsuit details the state’s history of funding schools and the increasing reliance on property taxes through school referendums to try to keep up with costs. Education advocates call for state lawmakers to invest in schools at a Feb. 2025 rally organized by the Wisconsin Public Education Network. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.
A group of Wisconsin parents, students, teachers, school districts and education advocates are suing the Legislature over the current school funding formula, arguing that the system does not meet the state’s obligation to provide educational opportunities to all students as required by the state Constitution.
The suit was filed Monday evening in Eau Claire County Circuit Court by Madison-based nonprofit Law Forward and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union.
The plaintiffs in the suit are led by the Wisconsin Parent Teacher Association and include five school districts, including Adams-Friendship Area School District, School District of Beloit, Eau Claire Area School District, Green Bay Area Public School District, Necedah Area School District, the teachers union of each respective district, eight Wisconsinites including teachers, parents, students and community members, as well as the Wisconsin Public Education Network.
The lawsuit names the state Legislature, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), and the Joint Finance Committee and its Republican and Democratic members.
Jeff Mandell, co-founder of Law Forward, told reporters during a press call Tuesday that schools have been doing their best to fully prepare students to be productive and active members of society but that the current funding system is making it almost impossible.
“These folks are not magicians. They are not Rumpelstiltskin. They cannot turn straw into gold, and we do not have what we need for our schools to thrive,” Mandell said.
Mandell noted that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has previously considered the way schools are funded in the 2000 case Vincent v. Voight.
The Supreme Court found in the Vincent v. Voight case, which was initiated by a group of Wisconsin students, parents, teachers, school districts, school board members, citizens and the WEAC president, that the state’s funding formula was constitutional.
The majority opinion indicated that the Legislature had articulated that an equal opportunity for a sound basic education is “the opportunity for students to be proficient in mathematics, science, reading and writing, geography and history, and for them to receive instruction in the arts and music, vocational training, social sciences, health, physical education and foreign language, in accordance with their age and aptitude.” The opinion also concluded that as long as “the Legislature is providing sufficient resources so that school districts offer students the equal opportunity for a sound basic education as required by the constitution, the state school finance system will pass constitutional muster.”
Mandell said that in the 25 years since the ruling “things have gotten considerably worse, and we are at a point where, for many districts … they are on the verge of crisis.”
The lawsuit lays out the difference between how Wisconsin schools were funded in the 1999-2000 school year versus the 2023-2024 school year. School funding 25 years ago was comprised of 53.7% state funds, 41.6% local funds and 4.7% federal funding; in 2023-24, the mix had changed to about 45% state, 43% local and 12% federal funding.
“The fault for this crisis lies not at the feet of students, parents, families, teachers, staff, administrators, school districts, or elected board members,” the lawsuit states. “The shortcomings of our public schools are directly traceable to the Legislature’s consistent failures to ensure adequate state funding of public schools and to legislate a rational school finance system that meets constitutional mandates.”
The lawsuit states that school districts across the state are “facing financial crisis” because of expiring federal funding and stagnating state dollars.
The suit also details the state’s history of funding schools and the increasing reliance on property taxes through school referendums to try to keep up with costs. It also details the ways that the state’s school choice program, which was launched in the 1990s and has grown exponentially over the years, has reduced funding for public schools.
Law Forward was at the helm of the 2024 lawsuit that ended with the Wisconsin Supreme Court declaring the state’s legislative maps an unconstitutional gerrymander and is in the process of challenging the state’s Congressional maps.
Mandell said the plaintiffs in the suit include a geographically diverse group to highlight how this is a statewide problem. He said it is possible that other districts will reach out about joining the case and they will “figure that out as we go.”
Joshua Miller, an Eau Claire Area School District parent, told reporters that “the dire need for adequate funding has been made clear to the lawmakers, but they have refused to hear our pleas”
“The situation is sad, absurd, and it’s infuriating,” he said. “Wisconsin’s current school finance system is broken and this lawsuit, which I am proud to join, would be a way for the courts to force legislators to make a new system that works and actually meets the needs of the students of Wisconsin.”
Tanya Kotlowski, a plaintiff in the case and superintendent for the Necedah Area School District, said her district is going to referendum for a third time this spring to help fund its operations. In April, the school district plans to ask voters to approve a four-year operational referendum that would provide a total of $5.8 million in order to maintain the district’s current level of educational programming as well as operate and maintain the district.
Kotolowski noted that she and other school leaders have spent a lot of time advocating on behalf of their schools to lawmakers for additional funding. During the recent state budget cycle, school funding was one of the top issues brought up by members of the public at listening sessions held by the budget committee.
“Despite all of those efforts, the funding system has not kept up with the needs of our children and the needs of our current realities,” she said. “Our local referendum, some would argue or could argue, has been 100% funding that mandated legal, constitutional obligation.”
According to the lawsuit, the Necedah Area School District has directed over $6.6 million — all of its operational referendum revenue — to its special education fund over the past eight years.
Kotlowski said her district has been underfunded by $13 million for special education costs over the last decade, and that if funding had kept pace with inflation, the district wouldn’t need to go to referendum this year.
Mandell said that referendum requests used to be fairly rare and used when a school district had large projects.
“What we’re seeing now is a system where school districts have no choice but to go to referendum regularly to try to fund basic operations to keep the lights on and to keep payroll flowing, and it’s really a tremendous problem,” Mandell said.
Referendum requests that allow schools to exceed state-imposed revenue caps through approval from voters became a part of Wisconsin’s school funding equation in the 1990s. Lawmakers implemented school revenue limit caps as part of an effort to control local property taxes.
The revenue limits used to be tied to inflation, but that was ended in the 2009-11 state budget, leaving increases up to the decisions of state lawmakers and the governor, who have not provided predictable increases budget to budget.
The recent state budget did not invest any additional state dollars into school general aid, in part because lawmakers were upset with Evers’ 400-year partial veto in the prior state budget. The partial veto extended a $325 per pupil school revenue limit increase from two years to four centuries, giving, schools the authority to bring in additional dollars from state funds or property tax hikes. Without the state providing additional funding, many schools have turned to raising property taxes using the school revenue authority to help support their operational costs.
“I understand there’s a big political debate about that veto, and about that mechanism, we don’t have a position on this. What we’re saying is that the school funding mechanism is not sufficient and is unconstitutional, even with that,” Mandell said.
The state budget did provide additional funding for special education reimbursement, but recent estimates show that the amount of funding will not be enough to provide reimbursement at the promised rates of 42% and 45%. Increasing special ed funding is part of ongoing negotiations between legislative leaders and Evers.
The lawsuit comes as the legislative session is coming to a close.
The state Assembly adjourned for the session last week and the Senate will wrap up next month, but the only bills with a chance of becoming law are those that have already passed the Assembly.
Even if a deal arises out of the current negotiations on property taxes and school funding, Mandell said the problem identified in the lawsuit will still exist. He noted that a proposal from Evers included $450 million towards school general aids — an amount that is $2 billion less than what schools would get if inflationary increases had continued in 2009. Mandell said Evers is not named in the suit because it is the Legislature that is chiefly responsible for appropriating funds.
“This is not a problem that arose overnight. It has developed over decades, and it’s not a problem that will be solved overnight,” Mandell said. “Any deal that the Legislature and the governor might reach… is not going to solve the problem.”
Mandell said that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are not looking for the court to decide on a specific amount of money that the state should provide to schools, but instead want the court to “fully explain and delve into how the finance system works, what the needs are, and to make some of those decisions.”
The lawsuit asks the court for a judgement that declares the Legislature hasn’t fulfilled and cannot “shirk” its constitutional obligation to fund schools at a sufficiently high level to “ensure that every Wisconsin student has an equal opportunity to obtain a sound basic education that equips them for their roles as citizens and enables them to succeed economically and personally in a tuition free public school where the character of instruction is as uniform as practicable.” It calls for the current funding system to be ruled invalid.
The lawsuit calls for relief that will “establish a schedule that will enable the Court — in the absence of a superseding state law, adopted by the Legislature and signed by the governor in a timely fashion — to adopt and implement a new school finance system that meets all relevant state constitutional guarantees.”
Mandell said, however, that it likely won’t be up to the court to decide exactly how the state should fund schools.
“There are almost an infinite number of options for how the Legislature could do this, but what we’re asking the court to do is to look at it and say to the Legislature, not good enough…. then we do expect that the Legislature and the governor will do their jobs,” Mandell said.
Mandell said that ideally a ruling would give lawmakers the opportunity to make changes in the next budget cycle. The budget process will kick off again in January 2027, after the state’s fall elections which will determine the make-up of the Senate and Assembly as well as choosing a new governor.
If the Legislature and the governor don’t fix the problem, Mandell said, the court should step in again.
An absentee ballot drop box with updated signage in Madison following the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision to allow the use of ballot drop boxes. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
A Dane County judge on Monday denied a motion from the city of Madison to dismiss a lawsuit against the city over its loss of nearly 200 absentee ballots during the 2024 election.
Since misplacing and failing to count the ballots, Madison has been subjected to penalties from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and has hired a new city clerk. The lawsuit against the city was brought by a group of the voters whose ballots were not counted. The voters are represented by the voting rights focused firm Law Forward.
Madison’s defense against the lawsuit has sparked criticism from voting advocates across the state for diminishing the importance of the right to vote. The city had argued it could not be sued for losing the ballots because absentee voting is a “privilege” and not a constitutional right. A legislative policy statement adopted in 1985 states that “voting is a constitutional right,” but that “voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.”
The lawsuit comes as Wisconsin election officials and Democrats have been defending absentee voting rights from Republican attacks for years. The argument by Madison officials drew criticism from a number of Democrats, including Gov. Tony Evers.
Dane County Judge David Conway wrote in his order denying Madison’s motion to dismiss that it wouldn’t make sense if the constitutional right to vote did not extend to absentee voting.
“Just because the absentee voting process is a privilege does not mean that those who legally utilize it do not exercise their constitutional right to vote,” he wrote. “Of course they do. Once a voter casts a valid absentee ballot that complies with the Legislature’s rules for utilizing the absentee process, the voter has exercised the same constitutional right to vote as someone who casts a valid in-person ballot at a polling place. And that right to vote would be a hollow protection if it did not also include the right to have one’s vote counted.”
President Trump's statements that Republicans should take over and run elections in many states, the domestic deployment of armed agents who are shooting people in nearby cities, along with Wisconsin's long struggle over fair voting rules, makes for a tense election season. But voters still have the power to defend their rights. | Photo of an anti-gerrymandering sign in the Wisconsin State Capitol by the Wisconsin Examiner
Wisconsin was almost certainly on President Donald Trump’s mind when he said this week, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Our swing state was Ground Zero for the fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump narrowly lost here. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office was involved in the effort to pass off fraudulent Electoral College ballots cast by state Republicans for Trump. Our state Legislature hosted countless hearings spotlighting election deniers and wasted $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars on a fruitless “investigation” of the 2020 presidential results, led by disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who threatened to arrest the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.
So how worried should we be about Trump’s election takeover threats?
“I wouldn’t be overly concerned that the president could get anything done that’s directly contrary to the Constitution,” says John Vaudreuil, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin and a member of the nonpartisan group Keep Our Republic, which works to promote trust in elections.
Not only does Article I of the U.S. Constitution expressly delegate elections administration to the states, Wisconsin has one of the most decentralized elections systems in the country, with about 1,800 local clerks running elections in counties, municipalities and townships throughout the state. “And they are Republicans, they are Democrats, they are independent,” Vaudreuil says. “Most fundamentally, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends.”
Trump’s threats of a federal takeover would be both legally and practically hard to pull off in Wisconsin.
But there is still reason to worry. Sowing distrust in elections takes a toll on clerks and poll workers, who have become less willing to put up with the threats and hostility generated by Trump’s attacks. Vaudreuil urges people to support their local elections officials and poll workers and spread the word that the work they do is important and that elections are secure.
Then there’s the danger that Trump could use his own false claims about election fraud to send federal immigration agents to the polls on the pretext that it’s necessary to address the nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.
Doug Poland, director of litigation at the voting rights focused firm Law Forward, has been involved in election-related litigation in Wisconsin for years, including a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from forcing the state to turn over sensitive voter information.
Poland sees Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections as part of a pivot from Republican efforts to make in-person voting harder — on the dubious theory that there’s a huge problem with voter impersonation at the polls — to a new focus on stopping absentee voting after many people began using mail-in ballots during the pandemic. But really, it’s all about trying to make sure fewer people vote.
Under former Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin passed a strict voter ID law, which one Republican former staffer testified made Republican legislators “giddy” as they discussed how it would make it more difficult for students and people of color to vote.
Like Vaudreuil, Poland sees the current threat from the Trump administration not as an actual takeover of election administration by the federal government, but as an escalation of intimidation tactics.
“Noncitizens generally don’t vote. So it’s a lie,” Poland says. “But it’s, of course, the lie that they’re going to use as a premise to send, whether it’s ICE or whomever it may be, to polling places, probably in locations with Black and brown populations, and that is purely for the purpose of intimidation. And at the same time, they’re pushing back very hard on absentee voting by mail.”
If the Trump administration is preparing to send armed federal agents to the polls to intimidate voters, absentee voting will be more important than ever in the upcoming elections.
Yet, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson recently told constituents that while he doesn’t think the federal government should take over elections administration, “I think we need to tighten up the requirements for absentee voting. I’m opposed to mail in register or mail in balloting.”
And as Erik Gunn reports, Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s Make Elections Great Again Act would restrict absentee voting, along with adding new layers of citizen verification steps while threatening to defund elections administrators who fail to comply with the bill’s onerous requirements.
“They’re going to do everything they can to try to make it harder to vote absentee by mail, to make it harder to vote absentee in person,” Poland says, adding, “They’re going to try to do it so they can put ICE agents around polling places and just try to intimidate people, to keep them away.”
So what can be done?
Voter intimidation is a crime, and specific instances can be addressed through lawsuits, Poland says. Still, he acknowledges (and Law Forward has argued in court) that once someone is deprived of the right to cast a ballot, there’s no remedy that can adequately compensate for that loss. That’s why it was so appalling when the city of Madison asserted that absentee voting is a “privilege” in response to a lawsuit brought by Poland’s organization over 200 lost ballots in the 2024 election.
Of course, in addition to worries about possible violations of individuals’ right to vote, there’s the fear that Trump could manage to subvert elections through heavy-handed tactics like the recent FBI raid to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County. Both Vaudreuil and Poland think judges would step in to prevent such a seizure in the middle of an election, before the ballots were counted.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, absentee voting remains legal and many municipalities are using secure ballot drop boxes. We need to keep on making use of our right (not our privilege) to vote, using all the tools we have in place.
As for the intimidating effect of armed ICE agents at polling places, local officials and perhaps local law enforcement could have a role in protecting the polls and reassuring voters it’s safe to cast their ballots. Neighbors who have been organizing to warn people of ICE raids, bring food to immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes, and form a protective shield around schools could become self-appointed polling place protectors.
If we are going to defend the core tenets of our democracy against an administration that has demonstrated over and over again its contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, it’s going to take massive public resistance and a flat refusal to give up our rights.
“What is it that will make them stand down from what they’re doing to break the law?” asks Poland. “I think the people of Minnesota have answered that for us better than anybody else can, which is that you have to stand up, you have to exercise your rights, First Amendment rights, the right to vote.”
Exercising our rights is the only way to make sure they are not taken away. Courage and collective action are the best protection we’ve got.
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