Children in an elementary school classroom. (Getty Images photo)

Gov. Tony Evers is on a back-to-school tour, visiting classrooms around the state and touting the budget deal he recently struck with Republicans after declaring 2025 the “Year of the Kid.” Evers “proudly signed a pro-kid, bipartisan state budget into law earlier this summer that invests nearly $1.4 billion in spendable revenue for K-12 schools,” according to a press release from his office celebrating Back to School Week.

You would never know from that announcement that the amount of new general aid schools receive from the state in the current, two-year budget cycle is exactly zero. Or that, as a result, about 70% of school districts across the state are starting the year with less money in the budget than they got in the last, austerity-level biennial budget deal. 

True, the budget includes a total of about $500 million in special education funding, with the state increasing the share of special ed costs it covers from less than 30% to 42% in the first year and 45% of costs in the second year. As Evers’ office puts it, that’s “the largest increase to the special education reimbursement rate in state history.” But it follows decades of decline and amounts to one-half of the 90% reimbursement rate under former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson and significantly less than the 60% Evers originally proposed. And the zeroed-out general aid from the state seriously undermines the impact of those long-awaited special education funds. 

The lion’s share of the $1.4 billion in “spendable revenue” Evers is celebrating comes in the form of increased taxing authority the state gave to local school districts — meaning the amount by which they are allowed to raise local property taxes to cover their costs. But local property taxpayers are getting weary of the constantly increasing demand on them to pay more for schools, and local school officials are dismayed that the state did so little to take on some of that cost.

Since special education is a federally mandated expense, the state’s shrinking reimbursement rate has taken a heavy toll on all school programs. For years, schools across Wisconsin have had to cut art, music, sports and other programs to pay a larger and larger share of special ed expenses. That’s why, at budget hearings throughout the state, so many people showed up to say a top priority for the new budget was an increase in the state’s share of special ed. 

“But never did anyone in those budget hearings come to the mic and say, ‘you should either give us general aid or special ed funding,” says Heather DuBois Bourenane, director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a statewide group that lobbies for public schools.

DuBois Bourenane says she’s already been getting calls asking her to help local communities put together springtime referendum campaigns asking local property taxpayers for more money on top of what the budget allows them to raise — something that’s never before happened this early in the year. She predicts another record-breaking year of school referendum efforts. Meanwhile, “we’re hearing in some districts they’re afraid to use the authority because local taxes are so high,” she says. “They’re talking about cuts.”

“It’s scary,” she adds. “The belt-tightening is going to be really bad.”

Advocates and school leaders had high hopes that Evers, a former science teacher and state superintendent, would fight to adequately fund public schools. Determined to get a deal, and negotiating with Republicans who seemed all too willing to let schools starve, Evers got what he felt was the best deal he could. And now he’s selling that deal as a good one. But the victory lap is misleading. Public school leaders across the state say the budget leaves teachers, students and local taxpayers in a bad situation. 

“Allowing an increase is one thing — paying for it is another,” LaCrosse News8000.com TV reporter Allyson Fergot explained in a story on how the state budget leaves schools strapped. “This summer lawmakers opted not to fund [a per pupil school funding] increase with state money, so if districts want it, they’ll have to raise district property taxes.”

“The state of Wisconsin currently has a $4.2 billion surplus, but no new general state aid has been provided to help schools meet rising costs,” Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard told Wisconsin Public Radio.

How did this happen?

During the budget debate, it was clear that Republicans were outraged by Evers’ line-item veto of the 2023-25 state budget, which extended a provision that increased the amount by which school districts could raise property taxes for the next 400 years.

In retaliation, Republicans promised that there would be no new state aid for schools in the current budget. And they stuck to their word. Wisconsin kids, not Evers, will pay the price of that maneuver. Clearly, it didn’t pay off. 

“It did real harm,” DuBois Bourenane says of Evers’ 400-year-veto. “This was a spite budget. It was petty.” And it wasn’t worth it: The amount of the increase Evers locked in for the next four centuries, at $325 per kid, didn’t even cover inflation. Overall, spending on schools in Wisconsin hasn’t kept pace with inflation for nearly two decades.

“We’re about a little over $3,000 short per kid just because of inflation over the past years,” Cochrane-Fountain City Superintendent Troy White told News8000.com

Could Evers have held out for a better deal? DuBois Bourenane thinks so. She was impressed by the massive public outpouring of support for schools at budget hearings, and the way public pressure helped shape bipartisan consensus on the need to support schools, take the burden off property taxpayers and increase state funding for special ed.

“And schools still came out with nothing,” she says.

When you add in the massive increases in funding for private schools through the state’s voucher programs, the outlook at the start of this school year is grim.

As the state mulls whether to accept a federal voucher program that has the potential to turbocharge the already rapidly expanding system of taxpayer-supported private schools, the Wisconsin Public Education Network is launching a voucher transparency project this month, to help taxpayers get a clear picture of how much they are spending on school vouchers on their property tax bills.

Meanwhile, “everyone should call their legislators and give them the numbers on how much less their districts are coming back to school with,” says DuBois Bourenane. “We need more leaders to do what they can with the leverage they can to fix this.”

Detail of a mural inside the Madison Labor Temple building celebrating unions and worker rights. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

“This fight is all of labor’s fight,” Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, declared at a “solidarity dinner” for 43 immigrant workers who recently lost their jobs at a Monroe, Wisconsin cheese factory. “Even Wisconsinites who don’t know about the story, should know in a cheesemaking state we should support cheesemakers.” 

The workers, some of whom labored for more than 20 years at W&W Dairy, were told in August they would have to submit to E-Verify screening and confirm their legal status in order to continue their employment after a new company, Kansas-based Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), bought the cheese plant. They walked off the job to protest, hoping DFA, which has a policy of subjecting new hires to E-Verify screening, would exempt them because of their many years of service. The company declined, but asked the workers to return to help train their replacements, one worker said. 

The cheese plant employees I spoke with said they were still in shock, worried about supporting their families as they face the loss of pay and benefits at the end of the month.

Workers who pulled long shifts, kept the plant going through the pandemic and took pride in producing high quality, Mexican-style cheeses — queso fresco, queso blanco, quesadilla and panela — now feel betrayed. 

Their goal is no longer to return to their old jobs. Instead, they are focused on getting severance pay from W&W Dairy, which is still technically their employer until Sept. 1 — Labor Day — when DFA assumes control of the plant.

On Thursday, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the immigrant workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, wrote to W&W president Franz Hofmeister to ask that the dairy show appreciation for its longtime workers by offering them a severance package. A Labor Day picnic organized by community members to support the workers, “would be an excellent opportunity to announce that the workers and the company have resolved their differences and that workers are being given some compensation,” Neumann-Ortiz wrote. “This would give the workers a chance to thank you publicly and provide some healing and closure.”

W&W’s success was propelled by its loyal workforce — fewer than 100 people who knew how to do multiple jobs in the plant and switched roles to keep things running smoothly. The quality of the product attracted a high-profile buyer. 

“The growth trajectory for the Hispanic cheese market is more than three times that of the cheese category,” Ken Orf, president of DFA’s Cheese, Taste and Flavors Division, told the trade publication Cheese Reporter, in an article about the benefit to the company of its “strategic acquisition” of W&W, which puts it in a “stronger position for growth with this important dairy category.”

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Hispanic employees of the plant.

Bibiana Gonzalez, a child care provider and community leader in the Monroe area, said she liked the term “essential workers” when she first heard it. The W&W workers felt they were essential to their employer’s success, and put in long hours during the pandemic, when other people were staying home to protect their health. But “unfortunately, people confuse essential workers with workers who can be exploited,” Gonzalez said.

“They want to toss these workers in the street just for being immigrants,” said Voces de la Frontera organizer Pablo Rodriguez.

DFA wants to distance itself from any thorny political issues around immigration. In a statement to WKOW Channel 27 news, the company asserted it had a goal “to retain 100% of the W&W workforce,” but that “as part of the hiring process to become DFA employees, all W&W workers and other applicants were notified of the need to provide documents to complete both an I-9 form and the E-verify process.” Failing to produce the proper documents, unfortunately, would mean “DFA’s ability to offer employment was impacted.”

Using cold, passive bureaucratic language, DFA casts it as a regrettable accident that its E-Verify policy rendered nearly half the cheese plant’s employees ineligible to continue working there. But as a cooperative with 5,000 dairy farm members, it’s impossible DFA leadership is unfamiliar with its industry’s heavy reliance on workers who don’t have papers.

In Wisconsin, where DFA has 399 member farms and four dairy manufacturing plants, an estimated 70% of the dairy workforce is made up of immigrants who cannot get E-Verifiable legal work papers.

In dairy, as in other year-round, nonseasonal industries, immigrants who make up the majority of the work force are ineligible for U.S. work visas. Congress has simply failed to create a visa for year-round jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, food service and other industries that rely on immigrant labor.

Far from being a drag on the economy, immigrant workers who lack legal authorization are heavily recruited by U.S. employers and “supercharge economic growth,” according to a new Center for Migration Studies research brief. The research brief shows that 8.5 million undocumented workers in the U.S. contribute an estimated $96.7 billion annually in federal, state and local taxes, “filling roles vital to critical industries.”

The brief also warns that mass deportations could cause critical workforce shortages. No one knows that better than Wisconsin dairy farmers, who would go out of business overnight if their mostly immigrant workforce was deported.

Union members who came out to support the W&W workers Tuesday night embraced the idea that all workers are in the same boat, are ill served by an authoritarian, bullying Trump administration, and will do better if they band together.

That’s the whole idea of solidarity: Working people need to unite to protect their common interests against the rich and powerful, who will run roughshod over all of us if they can. Expanding on that unifying message, Al Hudson, lay leader of the Union Presbyterian Church in Monroe, whose congregation supports the W&W workers, brought his social justice gospel to the union hall.

“We are proud to be a gathering place for the Green County Hispanic community,” Hudson said of his church. “We’re proud to do our part to be a Matthew 25 church,” he added, referring to the Bible verse in which Jesus calls on the faithful to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and visit those in prison. “This is what churches are supposed to do,” Hudson said. “I admire your courage,” he told the displaced W&W workers, pledging to continue to “walk with you and support you in your struggle as long as you want us there.”

The union members in the hall cheered. They applauded the W&W workers, they applauded speeches about solidarity among working people of every race and ethnic background. They seemed enlivened by the chance to do something to help.

The warm feeling of pulling together to resist the violent bigotry of the anti-immigrant Trump administration, recognizing the common struggle among all working people, was uplifting.

“Solidaridad!” shouted Gundlach, and the mostly gringo crowd of unionists shouted back, “Solidaridad!” 

Protesters gather in Milwaukee's Cathedral Square to march and rally as part of the No Kings Day protests nationwide. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Voting rights activists continue to be divided over gerrymandering. Here in Wisconsin, members of the Fair Maps Coalition, who just recently succeeded in getting representative voting maps for our state, are understandably alarmed by escalating threats to gerrymander the whole country, as Wisconsin Public Radio reports.

“I just hate it at its core,” Wisconsin League of Women Voters Executive Director Debra Cronmiller told WPR of the gerrymandering duel between Texas and California, as each state seeks to carve out more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We can’t save democracy by suppressing voters, and this has to be an opportunity to think about a new process and standards, especially in Wisconsin,” iuscely Flores, Wisconsin Fair Maps organizing director, told WPR.

But the president and CEO of Common Cause, the national organization dedicated to voting rights and fair elections, told members last week that the group “won’t call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarianism.”

The Common Cause position is tricky. On the one hand the group reaffirms its commitment to nonpartisan redistricting commissions. On the other hand it gives its blessing to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to suspend exactly the sort of nonpartisan commission the group endorses — and which Wisconsin fair maps advocates have long been fighting for. Supposedly, suspending the commission is a temporary measure while Democrats in the legislature draw up gerrymandered districts in time for the midterms. After they do that, Common Cause, Newsom and various Democrats claim California can undo the gerrymander later and restart the fight for fair maps. Really?

“Independent redistricting commissions are one way — and by far the best way — to draw fair maps and achieve fair representation for every single American,” Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause president and CEO wrote in a letter to the group’s members. But, a follow-up email from Common Cause reiterated the group’s non-opposition to Newsom’s plan in California, saying, “As the nation’s leading anti-gerrymandering advocacy group, we understand that Trump and Republican leaders’ attempt to lock in unaccountable power poses a generational threat to our ability to decide our own futures.”

Maggie Daun brought up those same dire threats on her Civic Media radio show when she grilled me about my last column arguing that we can’t gerrymander our way back to democracy. What if this is the existential moment and Trump is about to send troops into cities across the U.S. and destroy democracy, Daun asked. I agree with her that we’re in an existential moment. But just because we want Democrats to do something to stop Trump, as so many people so passionately do, that doesn’t mean that gerrymandering to get a narrow Democratic majority in the House is the right thing to do. For one thing, a new House majority won’t be seated until 2027 and won’t fix the immediate crisis.

Trump is already sending troops into Democratic cities. And his plan to try more federal takeovers will likely unfold before the midterms. What we need right now is a massive popular movement to resist authoritarian overreach, local leaders who stand up to Trump, and courts that continue to hold the line on his administration’s assault on the rule of law.

The courts have played the biggest role in restraining Trump so far, issuing injunctions and blocking his orders Their power has been badly limited by the U.S. Supreme Court, which curtailed judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions and greenlighted some egregious administrative actions. The current Supreme Court majority has also helped Trump’s larger project of dismantling democracy by gutting the Voting Rights Act and by allowing partisan gerrymandering — which delayed but ultimately did not derail Wisconsin’s efforts to get fair maps.

Common Cause has led the fight against both partisan gerrymandering and the destruction of voting rights. On Saturday, the group declared a National Day of Action, with rallies in communities across the country, including in Wisconsin, to resist Trump’s Texas gerrymandering scheme and his unprecedented deployment of federal troops to run roughshod over local communities. But the group’s message is somewhat muddled, mixing strong language about fairness and voting rights with tolerance for the prospect of blue-state counter-gerrymandering.

One good thing about the gerrymandering brushfire spreading across the nation is that it has provoked a bipartisan backlash. Republicans in New York and California, facing the prospect of being drawn out of their seats, have begun speaking out against the gerrymandering plan for Texas, Politico reports.

Some quick math suggests that Republicans are likely to win a nationwide redistricting war that pulls in Missouri, Indiana, Florida and other red states. But Republicans who are in a minority in California and New York are still worried about losing their seats. “Redistricting is not really an ideological exercise as much as a self-interest exercise,” California-based GOP strategist Rob Stutzman told Politico. Hence blue state Republican House members are calling for their colleagues to stand down in Texas and other red states, lest they lose their seats in the blue state counter-gerrymander. 

Instead of looking to gerrymandering, which is unfair, diminishes democracy and escalates hyper partisanship, opponents of the Trump administration need to keep building a big, pro-democracy movement that unites a majority of the country against Trump’s authoritarian overreach.

Wisconsin could lead the way. 

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who has been holding town halls in Republican districts, reports being deluged with worried questions from both his own and his GOP colleagues’ constituents who don’t like the cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and Social Security staffing in the unpopular “Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Most Americans don’t want to give away their health care, security and well-being so Elon Musk can get a tax cut.

Unfortunately, right-wing activists have played a long game, stacking the Supreme Court, blocking Democratic nominees, destroying the Voting Rights Act and putting the whole Heritage Foundation Project 2025 plan for authoritarianism in place. That won’t be undone in a single midterm election. But it is possible to leverage a broad-based populist movement of people who recognize it’s in their own interest to fight back. 

Hundreds of people came to the Capitol on Thursday, Oct. 28 2021 to testify against the new voting maps drawn by Republican legislative leaders which advocates characterized as 'gerrymandering 2.0' | Wisconsin Examiner photo

The drama in Texas, where President Donald Trump has demanded that Republicans quickly draw new GOP districts to thwart the will of the voters and ensure his party retains control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, has created massive discord. 

Progressives and voting rights advocates are divided on whether California and New York should fight the Texas power grab by gerrymandering their own states, creating more safe Democratic seats, even if that means undermining fair maps and the authority of those states’ nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

In Wisconsin, which just got out from under one of the worst partisan gerrymanders in the U.S., and the impenetrable, outsized Republican majorities in the state Legislature it protected for a decade and a half, this issue hits particularly close to home.

It’s head-spinning to hear arguments for Democratic counter-gerrymandering in other states from the same people in Wisconsin who were recently crying out for fair maps. 

If Democrats are going to mount a serious challenge to the fascist takeover of our country by Trump and his minions, it’s hard to see how ceding the moral high ground and running roughshod over the principle that the will of the majority of voters should prevail is going to help. 

I get that it’s more satisfying to imagine a quick fix to the fascist takeover of every branch of government than to listen to a lot of vague talk about long-term plans to rebuild democracy. After all, election deniers and the architects of the Jan. 6 attack are now running the federal government, demanding access to voter lists across the country and deploying the FBI to arrest political opponents, including the Texas Democrats who’ve fled their state to stall the gerrymandering scheme there. 

But here in Wisconsin, where we’ve just finally beaten back the most gerrymandered map in the country, it’s depressing to imagine Democrats abandoning the high ground and scrambling to do exactly what Republicans did when they controlled all three branches of government, attempting to lock in permanent political control against the will of the people.

If we want democracy, fairness, and the rule of law, we need to champion, well, democracy, fairness and the rule of law. 

In this most extreme political moment, with every public institution and the continued existence of U.S. democracy in doubt, I understand why the long view frustrates people. The emergency is now. I understand that many voters want to see Democrats “fight fire with fire,” as Newsom put it.

But consider this: Republicans control more state legislatures (28 Republican versus 18 controlled by Democrats) and have trifecta control of all branches of government in more states (23 all-GOP states versus 15 all-Democratic). JD Vance just launched a tour of Republican states to encourage more mid-decade gerrymandering. And Trump wants to hold a new census for the purpose of redefining who can vote. Even if Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul succeed in gerrymandering California and New York, Democrats are not likely to win the nationwide redistricting war.

Meanwhile, democracy will be the first casualty of that war. California and New York would have to suspend the work of their nonpartisan redistricting commissions — the gold standard for fair, nonpartisan map-drawing — and take back partisan control of the process in order to carry out their threats. If they succeed, it is beyond unlikely that the politicians who pull off that short-term victory will ever cede back their power over the voting maps to the nonpartisan commissions again.

On a deeper level, the Democratic gerrymandering fantasy takes the whole movement to oppose Trump in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of building grassroots support to counter an unpopular, authoritarian leader, it rigs the system to benefit a party whose whole problem is that it has lost the broad, popular support it needs to win elections and create a better, more enlightened government. 

Instead of trying to rig the maps to ensure a Democratic House majority in the next election, Democrats need to focus on winning elections and flipping seats in areas of the rural and industrial Midwest that were once reliably blue but have turned deep red.

To do that they need to make the case that health care, education and an adequate social safety net are bedrock rights in the richest nation on earth, and that we should not be giving tax breaks to billionaires by taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. 

They need to offer something to the farmers and factory workers and disaffected voters in rural and urban areas alike that is clearly different and better than the hate, corruption, and a determination to run roughshod over democracy that Republicans offer.

In Wisconsin, voting rights groups have been working on a campaign to push through a constitutional amendment modeled on one in our neighboring state of Michigan, to make sure that our voting maps are never again drawn up by partisan legislators.

That’s the kind of grassroots fight that helped Wisconsin finally overcome Republican gerrymandering. One important aspect of the fair maps movement is the way it engaged citizens to feel like participants, not spectators, in democracy, and to find their common interests instead of focusing on the politics of division. This, not more politicians in safe seats who don’t have to listen to voters, is what we need right now. 

The battle to beat back fascism does not turn on a handful of Democrats in protected districts. It turns on an organized uprising by the majority of people in the U.S. who are willing to join together despite their differences because they are sick and tired of having their democracy stolen from them, along with their health, safety, opportunity and hope. There’s no short cut to leading that fight. 

Middle income Wisconsinites got a $180 tax cut and lost services worth much more than that. | 3D illustration rendering by Getty Images Creative

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state legislators cut taxes by $1.3 billion in the new state budget, paying out a quarter of the state’s $4.6 billion surplus so that Wisconsinites who earn up to $200,000 can get a tax break worth an average of $180 per year.

That’s not a lot of money to trade for losing access to child care, reducing services that help veterans find jobs and housing, and cutting programs at schools. But somehow cutting taxes has become an agreed-upon, bipartisan top priority, even as the defunding of everything begins to take a major toll on our quality of life.

As Baylor Spears reports, more than 65% of Wisconsin school districts will face a reduction in funds under the new state budget. Many will go to local property taxpayers to ask for more – to the annoyance of citizens who are getting tired of the constant begging from schools that no longer receive adequate funding from the state. Local residents were willing to say yes to a record number of school funding referenda in 2024. But there are signs their patience is wearing thin.

Republican legislators are tapping into that annoyance with a bill to repeal the results of Evers’ partial veto of the last budget, which extended a temporary increase in the cap on revenue school districts could raise for the next 400 years. Evers’ maneuver outraged Republicans, who challenged the veto before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost. The new bill would undo the veto’s effect on school revenue caps (and the bill itself will also, presumably, be vetoed by Evers).

“The pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 402 years before this veto,” the Republican sponsors of the bill write. “It is hard to justify locking in a funding increase for just as long into the future.” 

But like the 180 bucks a year in “tax relief” Republican legislators are touting as a major victory for middle class Wisconsinites, Evers’ 400 year veto amounts to less than meets the eye. For one thing, it doesn’t lock in an increase — it just allows districts to raise an additional $325 per pupil through a combination of local property taxes and state aid. Individual school boards must still vote to pass any property tax increase. And the state could head off those property tax increases by putting more money into schools. Instead, Republican legislators insisted on no increase at all in general school aid in the budget. The same legislative Republicans who are howling about property tax increases created the problem, refusing to fund education and then blaming districts that turn to the only other source of funding they can tap.

Overall, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports, Wisconsin has slipped from one of the top states for education spending into the bottom half over the last 25 years. Tax-cutting replaced education as the state’s top priority. While most other states increased spending on education after the pandemic, in Wisconsin spending on schools went down. And we spend far less as a share of personal income on education now than we did in the early 2000s, and less than the national average.

Behind all of this budget math is the sad reality that, if we don’t agree to shoulder some expenses as a society, a lot of the elements of a decent life are out of reach for most people. Not paying for things through taxes doesn’t make expenses go away. It just makes them more burdensome on the smaller group that has to pay. It takes a bigger bite out of local property tax payers to pick up the cost of their schools than if the cost is spread across the state in the form of income taxes, and it’s even more expensive for individual families to pay the full cost of educating their kids. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin had the best school system in the Midwest at a cost of about 5% of personal income for taxpayers, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. That’s about $2,500 of a $50,000 income. Try to find full-time private education for less than that. 

Not just schools but a clean environment, public safety, good roads and reliable services and infrastructure that doesn’t fail are things we’ve long taken for granted. Those things are all threatened now. 

When I was a high school exchange student in Quito, Ecuador, I learned that running water in the affluent suburb where I lived was not guaranteed. Sometimes the water would go out when you were taking a shower. Keeping a bucket of water in the bathroom just in case was normal. Then a well known government official moved into the neighborhood and the problem, temporarily, cleared up. 

We are moving toward that sort of social setup now in the U.S. 

The assumption that drives tax-cutting mania at the state and national level is that we shouldn’t have to spend money toward collective, public goods. We should all pay our own way. That’s fine if you can hire your own private security firm, send your kids to private academies, and avoid contact with an increasingly desperate populace. For most people, it’s a terrible bargain.

It’s both cheaper and better for all of us, as individuals, to support a decent society for all. It only becomes unaffordable when we start pulling apart the fabric of society, convincing people they’ll be better off going it alone, after liquidating our collective wealth.

Undermining confidence in public institutions and cutting taxes so those institutions are underfunded and strained are part of the same push to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and help them shirk any responsibility to contribute to society

Why should poor people have health care? Why should the elderly and disabled be protected from being thrown out on the street? Why should little kids have nutritious meals? If you weren’t clever enough to be born rich, you deserve nothing. That’s not exactly how the Trump administration puts it, or the Republicans in the state Legislature who have been insisting for years on frittering away the state’s budget surplus on tax cuts worth very little to anyone who doesn’t already make a ton of money. But it’s the basic, underlying idea.

This argument is compelling only to people who don’t understand the math.

Elon Musk, whose $400 billion fortune is more than the wealth owned by one-half of all U.S. citizens combined, doesn’t want to pay what for him is a pittance to help maintain the health and wellbeing of our country.

Wisconsin Republicans were unwilling to spend $4 million — .004% of the total state budget — to maintain veterans’ services to keep military vets from becoming homeless.

Efficiency, cost savings — these are the alleged goals of the federal and state austerity programs. But the real goal is to make you forget what it was like to live in a functional society, one where kids had enough to eat and people didn’t die of preventable diseases, the environment was clean and Wisconsin children could get a great, free education, afford to go to college and dream of owning a home.

What the anti-government tax-cutters want is a society riven by resentment and anger, where people are divided against each other and the dysfunction makes it easy to “divide and conquer” as our last Republican governor memorably put it.

Down with education, down with clean water, down with health care and nutrition for poor kids. Up with lurid crime stories and hateful, divisive rhetoric.

When society falls apart, it’s much easier for greedy charlatans to plunder and steal the wealth of the state. And after we’ve codified irresponsibility — spent down the treasury and starved society and made permanent the arrangement whereby the richest people in society are not obligated to contribute, well then it becomes much harder to make the rich pay their fair share.

Try to remember what it was like to have a decent, functional Wisconsin. Try not to give in to the politics of distraction and division. Because $180 is a pathetic bribe to give up stability, security and the opportunity for the kids of today to grow up with hope that they can still have a decent life. 

No Kings Day protest march viewed from the Wisconsin State Capitol | Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Early campaign reports this week goosed speculation that Gov. Tony Evers might not run for a third term. Evers, who hasn’t declared his intentions, has only raised $757,214 this year and has $2 million in the bank, compared with the $5 million he raised during the same period in 2021, before his successful bid for a second term.

Some progressives, most vocally Dan Shafer, creator of The Recombubulation Area blog, have been calling on Evers to step aside. Traumatized by former President Joe Biden’s fumbling 2024 campaign, Shafer says Evers, who is 73 (a decade younger than Biden) should not make the mistake of hanging around too long and instead should “pass the torch.”

“This is not ultimately an argument about ideological differences or policy disagreements,” Shafer writes. For him, it’s about age. It’s about the Biden trauma. And it’s about the problem Democrats at both the state and national level seem to have nurturing the next generation of leaders.

For some progressives, it’s also about ideology and policy disagreements. Advocates for child care, public schools, criminal justice reform and protecting health care access were furious that Evers didn’t drive a harder bargain with Republicans in the recently completed state budget deal. 

Still, if Evers announces his retirement, a large, non-MAGA portion of Wisconsin will experience a moment of fear. In our closely divided purple state, there is a real possibility a Republican could win the governor’s office, just as new, fairer maps are finally giving Democrats a chance to compete for power in the state Legislature. The Republicans who have declared so far are wrapping themselves in the MAGA flag. Evers is popular across the state and has shown he can win.

Devin Remiker, the state Democratic party chair, has said he is “praying” Evers will run again. U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters recently that he couldn’t think of a better governor for Wisconsin than Evers.

If Evers doesn’t run, Attorney General Josh Kaul, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys and Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski are all likely Democratic candidates.

“There’s plenty of people on the bench who would love to be governor,” Pocan said. “… that’s not a concern. It’s really, I want the best person to be governor, and I think the best person who could be governor on the Democratic side is Tony Evers.”

Pocan calls Evers a “responsible adult” in contrast to Republicans who are following President Donald Trump off a cliff, slashing health care and food aid and driving up prices and deficits, making life a lot worse for a lot of people, including a projected 276,000 in Wisconsin who will lose health insurance and 49,000 who will lose food assistance under the federal mega bill.

There is an argument that Evers — “the most quintessentially Wisconsin politician I’ve ever seen,” as Pocan put it — accomplished what most Wisconsin voters wanted him to do in the budget process, put politics aside and get the best deal he could for state residents. Working across the aisle to achieve shared goals with the other party — including a last-minute maneuver that mitigates the disastrous Medicaid cuts Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through, drawing down $1 billion per year in federal funds for Wisconsin, was, as Evers himself pointed out, “significantly different” from the dynamic in Washington. 

“How about that, compromise?” Evers said Wisconsin voters told him, happily, when they heard about the deal. 

If the definition of compromise is a bargain that makes everyone unhappy, Democrats and progressives are clearly the more unhappy parties to this bargain.

Despite the glow of productive bipartisanship when the deal was struck, the details — and how the deal was done — are beginning to grate on some of Evers’ biggest former backers.

Big majorities of Republican legislators voted for the deal in both chambers. Five out of 15 Senate Democrats joined them, and there were only seven yes votes out of 45 Democrats in the state Assembly, where Speaker Robin Vos, who helped craft the budget, made it clear he didn’t need or want Democratic votes.

Arguably, the Democrats who gave impassioned floor speeches denouncing the budget have been in the minority in the Legislature for so long they never have to think about making the kinds of compromises involved in governing a divided state. If you look at it that way, it seems unfair of them to react angrily to Evers, a decent man who shares their goals and has worked diligently to accomplish what he can in the face of nasty opposition. Apart from Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, who joined the budget negotiations behind closed doors after it became clear Republicans were going to need some Democratic votes in the Senate, Democrats were largely shut out of the whole process.

And that’s the real problem with the way Evers governs, according to Robert Kraig of Citizen Action. By not involving legislative Democrats from the beginning, he disempowered not just those individual legislators but their constituents, giving up the pressure he could have brought to bear on Republicans if he leveraged citizen outrage and demands for action on broadly popular priorities — funding public schools, expanding Medicaid, keeping child care centers open, and the whole list of progressive policies in Evers’ original budget proposal.

Instead, Evers was the kind of adult in the room who sends everyone else out when it’s time to make a decision. 

This governing style, Kraig argues, is badly out of step with the political moment. As an increasingly dangerous, destructive administration sends masked agents to grab people off the street and throw them in detention centers or deport them without due process, liquidates safety net programs and deliberately destroys civil society, it’s going to take a massive, popular movement to fight back.

Maybe Shafer is right that a younger, dynamic Democratic candidate could emerge as a leader of that movement. Maybe the Democratic Party needs to stop praying for likeable, bipartisan father figures to deliver victory and instead open the doors to the somewhat chaotic, populist backlash that is brewing against the oligarchic, authoritarian kleptocracy led by Trump.

It’s a big risk. But we are in very risky times. Democrats, and the public at large, have not yet figured out how to defend against the unprecedented maliciousness of our current federal government and the MAGAfied Republican party. The whole idea of bipartisanship seems outdated in a world where one side is seeking to tear up the social contract, the Constitution, due process, the justice system, fair elections, and the most basic, longstanding protections against poverty, hunger and disease.

These are the same conditions that gave rise to the Progressive Era. Fighting Bob LaFollette fought the leaders of his own party and founded a nationwide movement to wrest control of government from the wealthy timber barons and railroad monopolies who, through corrupt, captive politicians, fought to control all the resources of our state and nation.

Now those same powerful interests are fighting to claw back everything, to destroy the reforms of the early 20th century protecting workers, the environment, and the public sphere. They are smashing public institutions and flouting legal constraints.

Democrats need to make the case to the public that they will fight back. And they need the public to rise up behind them to help them do it. 

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Prairie du Chien) speaks at a hearing in the House of Representatives. Van Orden claims to have engineered the Wisconsin State budget deal that mitigated the Medicaid cuts he voted for. | Screenshot via Youtube

Success has many fathers, but U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden is not one of them. Contrary to Van Orden’s triumphant tweets, he did not “secure” $1 billion for rural health care in Wisconsin. He had nothing to do with the bipartisan state budget deal that was drafted and rushed to completion in order to capture those funds — which, by the way, represent just a fraction of the billions the state stands to lose in Medicaid funds under the Republican mega bill Van Orden approved.

What Van Orden did do was vote to cut Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance, with the result that tens of thousands of rural Wisconsinites now face losing their health care coverage and several rural Wisconsin hospitals are in danger of closing. As he prepared to join the narrow, four-vote majority that passed the disastrous federal bill, Van Orden sent some last-minute messages to Gov. Tony Evers urging him to hurry up and sign the deal Evers had already reached with state legislators. Now Van Orden is taking credit for Wisconsin leaders’ work mitigating the harm he caused. It would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire. 

For months, Evers and leaders of the Wisconsin Legislature met behind closed doors to hammer out a deal, even as massive federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other programs essential to the wellbeing of Wisconsinites loomed. Among the issues Evers and legislative leaders agreed on was the importance of getting the budget done before the federal mega bill was signed, so the state could still qualify for $1 billion in soon-to-expire Medicaid matching funds. 

Evers signed the budget in the nick of time last week, at 1:30 a.m. on July 3, just before the U.S. Congress granted President Donald Trump’s wish and sent him his “big beautiful bill” to sign on July 4. 

Van Orden immediately began taking credit for both budgets.

“I just helped secure $1,000,000,000 a year for BadgerCare and $500,000,000 for rural healthcare infrastructure,” Van Orden boasted on X. The $500 million he claimed credit for was added to the bill by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and other Senate Republicans worried about the bill’s devastating impact on rural hospitals. Van Orden had nothing to do with it. Nor is the money earmarked for Wisconsin — it’s a nationwide program meant to blunt the blow Van Orden and his GOP colleagues have just dealt to rural health care. 

But the biggest whopper Van Orden told is that he somehow led the bipartisan budget deal between Evers and the Legislature. 

It seemed weird at the time when Van Orden, on the brink of voting for the federal law that will cause so many Wisconsinites to lose their health care, started shouting at Evers on X to hurry up and sign the state budget.

Now it’s clear that he was simultaneously preparing to vote to take health care away from his constituents and planning to take credit for saving them from the effects of his own vote.

After both budgets were signed, Van Orden repeatedly shared a copy of a letter he wrote to Evers on July 2 emphasizing the “importance of signing the proposed state budget into law without delay.” According to Van Orden, the letter and a conversation he claims to have had with Evers caused the governor to sign the deal the next day. 

“Not true,” Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback wrote on X in response to Van Orden’s bragging. “You never personally advocated to @GovEvers or our office to increase the hospital assessment in the bipartisan budget deal until it was already in the deal. And you had zero to do with Gov. Evers deciding to sign the budget before the reconciliation bill was signed.” 

What Van Orden did do was to vote for a bill that will push an estimated 30,000 rural Wisconsinites off Medicaid and will take away food assistance from another 90,000 people in the state, 1 in 3 of whom are children.

Van Orden was one of several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who expressed concern about the food assistance cuts in the GOP mega-bill — and then voted for the cuts anyway. 

Those cuts only got deeper after the bill moved to the U.S. Senate, and the bill’s cost in massive increases to the federal deficit also grew from $2.5 trillion in the House version to $3.4 trillion in the final deal. Still, Van Orden stayed on board, voting for the bill a second time when it came back to the House and sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan compares Van Orden to an arsonist who takes credit for recommending the residents of the house he torched take steps to put out the fire. “You know, he poured gasoline around the house. He started throwing matches around, and then he said, ‘you better use that extinguisher,’” Pocan said at a press briefing this week.

Van Orden continues to obfuscate. In between doubling down on his preposterous claims and slinging insults at his detractors on social media, the congressman who has been rebuked by Senate leaders of both parties for yelling vulgarities at high school pages claimed to have given Evers a lesson in civility and bipartisanship:  “Why did Tony sign the bill at 1:30 am? Because I asked him personally to put politics aside,” he declared this week. 

For all his posturing on X, Van Orden still hasn’t been willing to face his constituents in a town hall to stand behind his vote. Pocan decided to hold one for him last month, to explain the details of what he called the worst budget bill he’s seen in 30 years in politics. At a press conference Pocan said, “I think this month I may have to do another visit.”

Thousands of protesters marched up State Street and past the Wisconsin Forward statue at the state Capitol on Saturday. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

It was an encouraging week in Wisconsin. The state Supreme Court finally invalidated a cruel 1849 abortion ban, and Gov. Tony Evers declared victory after he and state legislative leaders reached a deal on the state budget he signed in the early morning hours on Thursday that adds back some badly needed support for schools and child care. The budget deal is not what a lot of Democrats and advocates wanted, but it’s better than the brutal austerity Republicans in the Legislature have imposed in the last several budget cycles. Most encouragingly, the end of gerrymandering forced Republicans to negotiate, since they needed Democratic votes in the Senate to get the budget passed.

Some Democrats still refused to vote ‘yes” on the budget. They pointed out that, while it includes a significant boost for special education, it leaves schools struggling with zero general state aid. A majority of school districts will see revenue go down, and most will have to beg local property owners to raise their own taxes. To make matters worse, the Trump administration is freezing billions in promised aid to K-12 schools. 

Child care advocates who fought for desperately needed state support got about one-quarter of the aid Evers had originally proposed. Some were relieved, but others told Examiner Deputy Editor Erik Gunn that it’s just not enough to save centers from going out of business and parents from losing access to care.

The health care outlook is also bleak. With the feds poised to make Medicaid cuts that could cause 60,000 Wisconsinites to lose health care, the state budget fails to expand Medicaid and won’t even cover postpartum care — making us one of only two states to refuse health care to low-income mothers of newborns.

The worrisome backdrop to all of this is the federal budget plan President Donald Trump and Republicans are pushing through Congress that simultaneously runs up giant deficits and takes an ax to safety net programs on a scale we’ve never before experienced. 

The massive bill that passed the U.S. Senate this week slashes health care and nutrition assistance and will lead to the closure of rural hospitals, decimate green infrastructure projects that have been a boon to Wisconsin and will make life harder and more expensive for most people — all to funnel millions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and to fund a chilling escalation of a militarized immigration police force. 

Our own U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson threatened to vote against the House version of the bill, which was projected to increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion, because, he said, the deficits it created were “mortgaging our children’s future.” But Johnson then voted for the Senate version, which ratchets up the deficit even more, to $3.3 trillion. So much for the self-described “numbers guy.” Kowtowing to Trump and making permanent the tax cuts Johnson personally benefits from was more important to him than his alleged concern about deficits.

It makes sense that much of the news about the Republican budget deal has centered around the devastating health care cuts and the ballooning federal deficit. But the $170 billion in the budget for immigration enforcement is sure to change the landscape of the United States — escalating raids, deportations without due process and a massive new system of private detention centers on the model of the detention camp in a Florida swamp that apparently thrilled Trump when he visited it during congressional budget deliberations.

Brace yourself for the impact of the supercharged ICE budget. Unlike Texas — where terrorized immigrant workers are staying home after raids, causing farmers to fear they’ll  go under as their labor force disappears — we haven’t experienced big workplace raids in Wisconsin. If ICE has a lot more manpower, that could change.

I spoke this week with a dairy farmer in the Western part of the state who reported that, despite the terrifying videos circulating online of violent arrests by masked immigration agents, his employees are carrying on as usual, coming to work, going out, not changing their plans. “We haven’t had any raids on dairy farms in Wisconsin,” he pointed out. 

It’s eerie how normal life continues to be in rural Wisconsin, where 70% of the labor on dairy farms is performed by immigrant workers, almost all of whom lack legal documents to live and work in this country, because Congress has never created a visa for year-round, low-skilled farmwork. The farmer I spoke with said he had just returned from watching a soccer match among immigrant workers and everyone was in a good mood.

He added that officials in Trump’s agriculture and labor departments have repeatedly reassured an industry group he’s part of that the administration understands how dependent employers are on their immigrant workers and that they don’t want mass deportation to harm them.

Wisconsin dairy farmers and other employers are hoping Trump continues to be influenced by the people in his administration who tell him he shouldn’t destroy the U.S. agriculture, construction and hospitality industries. They felt encouraged by Trump’s recent statement that “we’re going to take care of our farmers and hotel workers,” and his claim that he’s working on deportation exemptions for whole classes of immigrant workers who don’t have authorization, but on whom U.S. industries rely.

But the Stephen Miller wing of the administration doesn’t care about any of that. 

The whole narrative promoted by Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself, that the U.S. is suffering an “invasion” by a large number of immigrants who commit violent crimes is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. born citizens. They are an absolutely essential part of the U.S. economy. And they are loved and valued members of our communities. Most of the people the Trump administration has been rounding up have never been convicted of any crime, let alone violent crime. They are landscapers, roofers, farmworkers, students, parents driving home from work — just like the  people Trump claims he is going to protect. As the administration ramps up its program to incarcerate and deport them, with a militarized push on a scale our country has never seen, Trump is trying to have it both ways — reassuring employers that he won’t target the “good” immigrants who work for them, while peddling the lie that there are tons of “bad” immigrants who deserve to be kept in cages in an alligator-infested swamp. 

The idyllic, peaceful atmosphere in Wisconsin, where we feel far away from violent kidnappings by unidentified, masked federal agents, could change in a dramatically dark fashion once the ICE receives the tens of billions of new dollars in the Republicans’ federal budget plan. We saw the showy arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan and immigrants who, trusting the legal system, showed up for their court dates in Milwaukee. We saw the needlessly cruel forced departure of Milwaukee teacher’s aide Yessenia Ruano and her U.S.-born little girls back to El Salvador — the country Ruano fled after her brother was murdered there by gang members and where she felt her life was threatened.

With tens of billions of dollars in new money to spend and quotas to meet for its mass deportation program, ICE could begin rounding up the hardworking immigrants who keep our dairy industry going, in parts of the state that overwhelmingly vote for Republicans.

That spectacle, along with the hideous cuts to health care, education, food assistance and other programs that make life livable in Wisconsin, will surely provoke a backlash against the politicians who enabled it. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 24: New York mayoral candidate, State Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) speaks to supporters during an election night gathering on June 24, 2025. Mamdani was announced as the winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor in a crowded field in the City’s mayoral primary to choose a successor to Mayor Eric Adams, who is running for re-election on an independent ticket. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The run-away success of 33-year-old Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor’s race shook the political establishment across the country. In Wisconsin, where Democrats are hoping to regain control of at least one legislative chamber in 2026, and where Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has not yet announced whether he’ll seek a third term, Mamdani’s overthrow of the uninspiring establishment candidate and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo should trigger some serious thinking about how Democrats win in the Donald Trump era, and who they represent.

On Wednesday, the morning after the New York City primary, the Republican Party of Wisconsin put out a press release attempting to connect Mamdani to Rebecca Cooke, the Democrat planning to run in a rematch race against U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District. The through-line between Mamdani and Cooke is that Sen. Bernie Sanders has endorsed both candidates. The Wisconsin GOP seized on what it saw as a political opportunity to defend Van Orden in a statement bashing “radical Rebecca” and asking: “Does Democrat political operative Rebecca Cooke agree with her fellow Bernie endorsed candidate on his radical positions? … Keep in mind, President Trump carried WI-03 by 8 points just last year.”

Cooke, contrary to Republican campaign propaganda, is a middle-of-the-road Democrat who earned the endorsement of the Blue Dog Coalition, the most conservative Democratic group in the U.S. House. She certainly agrees with Mamdani that the housing crisis and high prices are key issues for working class voters, but she’s unlikely to support his bolder proposals like publicly owned grocery stores. And Wisconsin Republicans are wrong to think they can easily beat Democrats by accusing them of being “radical” and tying them to Mamdani and Bernie Sanders.

The real radical in the 3rd Congressional District is Van Orden, a MAGA diehard who voted to take away medical care and nutrition assistance from his own constituents, and who likes to make a spectacle of himself, yelling at pages in the U.S. Capitol and mocking Democrats who expressed grief after the assassination of a state legislator in Minnesota.

It seems likely that by 2026, when the “big, beautiful” destruction of public goods from Medicaid to the Forest Service to infrastructure and education to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy have begun to bite, voters will have had more than enough of that brand of radicalism.

Wisconsin voters have a strong independent streak. 

Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary here by 13.5 percentage points. Sanders’ anti-establishment, progressive populist message resonated particularly strongly with voters in the 3rd District, in the same counties that ultimately went for Donald Trump that year and again in 2024. 

As Democrats in our swing state try to figure out how to win again, they should take a lesson from the voters in New York City who rejected the arrogant and deeply compromised Cuomo and chose an inspiring progressive populist, catapulting him to leadership of a new generation of Democrats. 

That doesn’t mean Mamdani would win in the 3rd District, or that he’s the model for Democratic candidates everywhere. But it does say something that he triumphed over his detractors from both political parties despite their money and clout, by connecting directly with voters who were worried about housing and high prices. Like both Sanders and Trump, Mamdani presented an alternative to the political establishment and listened actively to voters’ actual concerns. He bravely stood up to big money and stale conventional wisdom. He recognized the urgency of the moment. He leveraged the enthusiasm of young people and beleaguered working people who feel overlooked. He inspired people. He was a breath of fresh air.

What does that mean for Wisconsin? 

This week the latest Marquette Poll reported that 55% of voters don’t want Evers to run for a third term as governor. Various political commentators have compared Evers to ex-President Joe Biden, warning that at 73 (almost a decade younger than Biden) he might be too old to win. The poll helped fuel a new round of that sort of speculation.

But the question for Democrats is not whether Evers should run again. Presented with no alternative, 83% of Democratic voters told Marquette pollsters they want Evers. 

The real question is, what is the party’s vision for its own future and the future of our state? For a long time, Democrats in Wisconsin have lacked a bench. If Evers decides not to run, there is no obvious candidate to take his place. Meanwhile, Evers is currently engaged in backroom negotiations with Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on the state budget. Embarrassingly, Democratic leaders in the Legislature are not included in those talks and appear not to know what’s being traded behind closed doors. 

Asked whether she thinks the closed door sessions are OK, Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein told reporters, “I think this is probably normal. I’ve talked to other majority and minority leaders in the past, and this is kind of how it’s happened in the past.”

That’s it?

As legislative Democrats conduct what some have called a dress rehearsal for real power, preparing to step into the majority for the first time in more than 15 years, it’s not clear how they will govern. Will they still let a Democratic governor call all the shots in budget negotiations? Will they play hardball if a Republican takes Evers’ place — following the example of the current Republican majority and blocking every initiative the governor proposes and seizing his powers whenever they get a chance? What are their bottom-line issues? How will they transform the lives of the people of our state? 

We badly need a more functional government and a more cohesive Democratic Party in Wisconsin.

More than anything, we need bold, progressive leadership that articulates a strong vision for a government that serves the interests of the majority of voters, not just rich people and insiders. Mamdani showed that there is real hunger for that in the electorate. That should be an inspiration to Wisconsin’s future leaders.

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.

U.S. Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore toured Wisconsin's only the ICE detention facility and demanded answers about the people being targeted for deportation in the state | Official photos

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore contacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Friday to ask the agency to remove a statement from the top of its website describing Milwaukee resident Ramón Morales Reyes as “this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump.” 

The bizarre accusation that Morales Reyes wrote a letter threatening to kill the president has been disproven, and the man who tried to frame him has confessed to forging the letter.

Yet, on Friday, when Moore visited the ICE detention center in Dodge County, Morales Reyes was still there. And the lurid accusation against him is still prominently featured at the top of the Homeland Security website. In the featured statement, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thanks the ICE officers who arrested Morales Reyes, promotes the idea that he is a dangerous criminal who poses a grave threat, and promises, “He will remain in ICE custody at Dodge County Jail in Juneau, Wisconsin, pending his removal proceedings.”

Moore held a Zoom press conference after her visit. She described Morales Reyes as a humble, religious man who, incredibly, bears no ill will toward Demetric Scott, the man who has been charged with stabbing and robbing him and who then tried to get him deported so he couldn’t testify as a victim in Scott’s upcoming trial. 

It’s very important that the U.S. government stop spreading misinformation about Morales Reyes and afford him due process, Moore said, not just because of the outrageous injustice of his particular case, but because of what it means more broadly. Morales Reyes is an applicant for a U visa — a type of nonimmigrant status set aside for crime victims who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are cooperating with law enforcement or the government in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

Scott, the man charged with stabbing Morales Reyes and who has admitted forging the letter that led to his arrest, was trying to short-circuit that cooperation ahead of his trial for a violent armed robbery.

If the government deports Morales Reyes, “it will embolden criminals,” Moore said. It’s critical that the U.S. government protect immigrants who are victims of crimes, like Morales Reyes, because if we don’t, we are abetting the criminals. “That’s the message that we’ll be sending if we deport these individuals,” Moore said. “If you’re some pimp out there, some trafficker, some drug pusher, and you want to find someone to abuse, all you’ve got to do is find an immigrant.”

Coincidentally, on the same Friday afternoon Moore visited Morales Reyes and began her campaign to get the government to stop spreading misinformation about him, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Trump administration officials were finally bringing back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man they wrongly deported to El Salvador. But, Bondi said, the government is charging Abrego Garcia with a slew of serious crimes including being “a smuggler of humans and women and children.”

We don’t know yet if the federal case against Abrego Garcia will include another ham-fisted attempt to pass off obviously doctored photos of his hands with photoshopped “MS-13”gang tattoos. But the administration that continues to push the discredited claim that Morales Reyes penned a letter threatening to assassinate the president inspires zero trust. 

What a relief, in this awful political climate, to see Moore sticking up for immigrants who are being targeted and terrorized, demanding answers from ICE and doing her best to uphold the rule of law. Moore has also been championing Yessenia Ruano, the beloved Milwaukee teacher’s aid who has a pending application for a T visa as a victim of human trafficking, and has been ordered to self-deport back to El Salvador, where she was victimized. Going back would place her in serious danger and leave her young daughters without a mother. 

“She’s an exceptional asset to the school district where she works, not a threat at all to the community,” Moore said.

A week before her visit with Morales Reyes, Moore was joined by her fellow Wisconsin Democrat, U.S. Rep Mark Pocan, on an unannounced inspection visit to the Dodge County jail, Wisconsin’s only ICE detention facility. Moore went back again Friday because she was initially refused an interview with Morales Reyes.

“We have congressional prerogative to do an unannounced visit” to see what’s going on in ICE detention, Pocan said. “In fact,” he added, “I think [it’s] a requirement, really, morally, to do an unannounced visit to these facilities.” 

When they got to the jail, Pocan and Moore had to explain their oversight prerogative. They presented a letter from the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and waited an hour to get inside. They expressed appreciation for the sheriff, who let them come in and tour the facility, though they weren’t permitted to talk to any detainees. 

When they tried to contact ICE it was another story. There were no ICE agents present — they only show up to bring in detainees every three weeks, the sheriff told them. When they tried to call the Milwaukee ICE field office, the phone was disconnected. They left messages at the Chicago office that were not returned. Of the roughly 100 immigrant detainees at Dodge, who come from all over the country, they couldn’t find out how many have been arrested in Wisconsin. 

“This is the problem, right?” said Pocan. “ICE treats us all like we don’t deserve to get information, even though we have oversight authority.” 

Part of what bothered Pocan, he said, is “the arrogance that we’ve seen from ICE so far this year.” 

“ICE is acting like they are somehow above the law,” he said, “above lawmakers.” 

It has become abundantly clear that the Trump administration’s rhetoric about targeting dangerous criminals for deportation is utter bunk.

Neither Morales Reyes nor Yessenia Ruano nor Abrego Garcia poses a threat to community safety. The real threat is coming from masked ICE agents terrorizing immigrants and local communities.

We desperately need leaders who will stand up to these terror tactics. That takes guts, as the arrest of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan showed, as did the Homeland Security agents barging into a congressional office and roughly handcuffing a staffer they accused of letting protesters hide there.

I’m grateful for the courage of Moore and Pocan. 

As they said, if we don’t stand up for the people the Trump administration is targeting now, we will be next.