On his way out of office, Gov. Tony Evers has negotiated a school funding and tax cut bill with his fellow retirees, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. Call it a retirement celebration for three soon-to-be-ex politicians. Evers is promoting a big bump in school funding in the “blockbuster” deal and urging Democrats to vote for it. But the most joyful celebrants of this sudden windfall are Republican legislators, who have taken to calling it the “big, beautiful, bipartisan bill” —  a not-so-subtle echo of Trump’s triumphant name for the massive tax cut and spending bill he jammed through Congress.

Wisconsin Democrats are less than thrilled. On the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, the “blockbuster” proposal passed on a straight party-line vote, as Erik Gunn reports, with all of the Republicans on the committee voting in favor and all the Democrats voting against it. The bill is not so much a blockbuster as a budget-buster, said Joint Finance Democrats Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay), Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and Tip McGuire (D-Kenosha). 

The problem with the legislation, according to its critics, is that it consists largely of one-time expenditures – including a temporary infusion of cash to schools and $300 checks to be mailed to Wisconsin state taxpayers — that will drain state coffers of about $2.9 billion after the whole package of proposals is paid out. While it effectively erases the state’s budget surplus, it won’t fix the structural problems with the way the state consistently underfunds schools and leaves property taxpayers to pick up the bill, or with the growing drain created by an expanding system of taxpayer-subsidized private schools, which will also get more money through this deal. Meanwhile, it creates the very real possibility that new legislative leaders and a new governor will be staring at a nearly $3 billion revenue hole when they begin to work on the next state budget, in an uncertain economic time.

The plan does include a burst of state funding for special education – sorely needed and, as Evers underscores, a big boost from current levels to a projected 50% reimbursement in the final year of the current budget cycle to school districts across the state. Evers’ office put out a comprehensive list of school districts and the millions in new money they will receive. The deal also allocates $350 million to bring down property taxes. And it eliminates taxes on tips and overtime, in keeping with Trump’s new federal policy. These are all popular proposals, and they provide a shot of relief to stressed and strapped school districts and taxpayers.

But advocacy organizations you would expect to embrace the governor’s move to increase funding for special ed have come out against the deal. 

“People with disabilities depend on programs and services that get state and federal funding,” Sydney Badeau, chair of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities, said in a statement on the deal. “Spending down Wisconsin’s savings and reducing income when the state is already not providing enough funding to cover actual costs means there will be even less money next budget to pay for the programs people need. Less savings and less income means budget cuts next cycle at a time when many state programs, services, and infrastructure need more investment.”  

Kids Forward, the statewide antiracist policy center, also opposes the deal, saying it “relies on one-time money to paper over long-term challenges, all while legislators preparing to leave office pass the responsibility — and the blame — onto future lawmakers and families across Wisconsin.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are already turning the deal into campaign talking points on their most challenging issue – affordability

“Folks need help now,” declared Joint Finance Committee Co-Chair Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), adding that inflation has been a problem “for at least five years,” a spin on voters’ cost-of-living worries that conveniently avoids the Trump administration’s responsibility for surging gas prices and massive healthcare cuts, which are dragging down state Republicans as they campaign this year.

Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) touted the deal in a Tuesday press conference, saying Republicans have always been better stewards of the economy, and it was because of their wise leadership that Wisconsin built up a budget surplus in the first place (mostly by abandoning the state’s obligation to fund public schools). Now, she declared, it’s time to give all that money back to the taxpayers – “it’s their money” and rightfully belongs to individuals, she said, not “progressive politicians in Madison.” This is the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy at work – defund schools and hand out checks to individuals. It works best if you are extremely wealthy and don’t mind trading in public education and other forms of public infrastructure for a pay-as-you-go system where you spend your own cash for private education, private health care and private security.  

Nedweski rolled directly into campaign mode, declaring that the benefits to taxpayers in the deal “would all be at risk” if the Democrats win control of the Legislature next year.

Without a doubt, Evers has handed Republicans a massive election-year gift.

Democrats, if they do manage to win legislative majorities – which has seemed more and more likely as Republicans flee the Capitol in droves, including some who represent key, swing districts — would be in a much stronger negotiating position than Evers is now. Instead of a one-time boost in school funding and a flurry of tax-rebate checks, they could recommit to guaranteed state funding for public education, as a lawsuit brought by students, parents and teachers argues they must under the state constitution. 

Now, as the national economy is in turmoil, they will confront the next budget cycle with a looming $2.9 billion hole – the budget surplus blown by a bunch of guys who are heading out of office and won’t have to worry about what comes next.

It was one thing for Evers to wrangle with Republicans and try to claw back funding for schools when the GOP-led Legislature was single-mindedly determined to block his every move. It’s a different matter to trade away the bulk of the state’s budget surplus now, in the waning days of his term, with everything up in the air.

The lack of communication between Evers and members of his own party has rankled Democrats for a long time. But the deal he is pushing to a reluctant Democratic caucus and delighted Republicans is a blow both politically and, more importantly, to the future health of the state. 

The Atwood Music Hall in Madison was packed Wednesday afternoon, as community members said goodbye to Stuart Dymzarov, the founding principal of Malcolm Shabazz City High School and, for many, many people, a beloved mentor and friend.

Colleagues and former students at Shabazz, the alternative school launched in 1971 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, remembered Stuart’s fierce advocacy for his vision of an open-minded, flexible school. “Education by any means necessary,” was his riff on the famous slogan of the school’s namesake, Malcolm X.

Hearing the eulogies for Stuart, a big bear of a man with a wild beard, radical politics and a radiant warmth, brought back the optimism and high spirits of a generation of Madisonians who protested the war in Vietnam, rejected careerist striving and established their own little cooperative communities in the idealistic belief that they were on the cusp of changing the world for the better. 

One of those starry-eyed idealists was my mother, Dorothy Conniff, who lived in a collective household with Stuart and a dozen other young radicals on Spaight Street on Madison’s East Side. She was in her 20s then and I was just a toddler. “We supported each other’s projects and ideals and had intense discussions about how to change the world,” my mom wrote in the online guest book for Stuart’s memorial. I remember a single check she kept in a scrapbook from the joint household account of those days, with 14 names in the upper lefthand corner — a testament to the trust and cooperation in that happy group. 

Like a lot of young people in the heady 1960s and 1970s in Madison, my mom, Stuart and their whole cohort felt progress over injustice and violence was underway and the world would soon be a brighter place.  “We were optimistic because the antiwar movement had forced Lyndon Johnson out of office,” my mom told me. A lot of former Madison radicals were in the white-haired crowd at the memorial service, including former Mayor Paul Soglin, former Alderman Billy Feitlinger and Jeff Feinblatt, one of the Shabazz teachers who, inspired by Stuart, nurtured and inspired a new generation of young people.

I remember Stuart as a big, benign presence in striped overalls, hoisting the kids in the Spaight Street household on his shoulders and rumbling around the house. Later he became a devoted father to his own three children with his wife of 50 years, Marsha (the two combined their last names, Dym and Zarov) and a beloved uncle, grandfather and father figure to hundreds of Shabazz students. 

Stuart’s nephew Miles Kietzer gave a touching tribute to the uncle who used to pick him up along with his sister after school and take them wherever they wanted to go, buying them treats and letting them fritter away his money on plastic trinkets with an easy-going smile.

Stuart’s brother Harvey described how Stuart would spend endless hours hanging out and having conversations with people, and when Harvey quizzed him on what they had said and what he had learned, he shrugged it off. “I like experiencing people,” he told Harvey. That acceptance and enjoyment of people with no particular goal in mind was classic Stuart.

Stuart was always willing to give people rides, day and night, including, according to one of his younger relatives, on a memorable night when he called Stuart from a biker bar where he was having a drug-induced attack of paranoia. Stuart drove across town in the middle of the night, appeared in the doorway of the bar, a looming presence in a khaki jacket and driving cap, wrapped his younger relative in a hug and took him home.

The feeling of safety and love he gave people is the strongest, lasting impression Stuart left.

He was a fighter — against the “fascist” politics he despised in the U.S. government, even before the current era, and on behalf of people he felt were not given a fair shake. His friends remember his ferociousness on the basketball court, his relentlessness in political arguments, and his tireless, aggressive advocacy at school board meetings and the superintendent’s office on behalf of the staff and students at Shabazz.

But mostly, Stuart made people feel cared for, appreciated, heard. It seems to me that quality is exactly what we need right now, to counter the epic cruelty, hatred and greed that is engulfing our nation and the world.

The sunny optimism of the 1960s counterculture seems far away today. But Stuart’s legacy lives on, not just at the still-thriving alternative high school he founded (where the family encourages people to make a donation to the scholarship program in his name), but also in the light he brought into the world by really seeing other people, accepting and loving them. Experiencing that quality in Stuart in small ways, one on one, is what made such a difference for people. More than any grand political program or analysis, it is a powerful antidote to despair. 

International Workers Day on May 1 commemorates the great labor struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when workers fought and died for decent wages and working conditions.

The militant energy of the early labor movement, long dormant in the United States, has been making a comeback recently as Americans chafe at economic instability, the destruction of health care and other basic rights and protections, and recoil from a government dedicated to further enriching billionaires at the expense of working people. Add to that the campaign of terror the Trump administration has launched against immigrants who do much of the manual labor in this country and the violent repression of the neighbors who try to protect them, and it’s starting to feel like 1886.

On Friday, May 1, labor unions and immigrants rights groups are coming together to organize mass walkouts in more than 3,000 cities across the U.S. “No work. No school. No shopping” is the tag line for the national campaign, joined in Wisconsin by Madison Teachers Inc., the Southcentral Federation of Labor, and myriad civic groups. 

This week’s protests grow out of “A Day Without Immigrants,” the May Day general strikes that began 20 years ago to oppose Wisconsin U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s federal bill that proposed making unauthorized presence in the U.S. a crime punishable by mandatory prison sentences. For the first time, in those May Day protests, “you saw largely Latino immigrant, working-class families … with grandparents and baby strollers, coming out in this peaceful wave of mass marches,” recalls Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, the Milwaukee-based immigrant workers’ rights group. “It really was like an earthquake, and it shelved that terrible bill and put the conversation of immigration reform back on the table.”

This year, national labor unions are showing up for the May Day actions in a big way. That’s inspiring, because it’s clear that massive resistance from a broad, working-class movement is what it’s going to take to stop the brutal repression and outright theft of public resources by the current regime.

“Workers’ rights and immigrants’ rights are the same,” Andy King, managing director of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) said on a May Day press call this week. His group’s May Day demands include no more funding for ICE and Border Patrol, permanent protections and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, and stopping the construction of megawarehouses for the mass detention of human beings. 

The fear-mongering about immigrants coming from the Trump administration is not an accident, Neumann-Ortiz said during the same call. “It’s a strategy to divide us, to scapegoat and to distract from the real challenges working families face, and in particular, the growing control of our economy by billionaires.” She talked about the heartbreaking case of Elvira Benitez, a mother of three from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, who was arrested by ICE during a routine check-in after she was approved for a green card. Now she’s sitting in detention in Kentucky, and her youngest daughter is under medical supervision for suicidal thoughts related to the traumatic experience of being separated from her mom, Neumann-Ortiz said.

She also highlighted the case of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, a legal permanent resident, who was detained by ICE in what appears to be a retaliatory arrest for his political speech defending Palestinian rights. 

A secretive police agency that whisks people away in order to silence dissent should worry all of us. “And these are not isolated cases, as we know,” Neumann Ortiz said. “It’s a system.”

Deaths in ICE custody have hit a new record since the beginning of Trump’s second administration. Yet the federal government plans to expand warehouse detention to house more than 92,000 people. Adriana Rivera of the Florida Immigrant Coalition told reporters on FIRM’s May Day press call, “our state has become ground zero for a system that warehouses human beings for top dollar, makes jokes and merch at their expense, where suffering is hidden and accountability is absent.”

“Shut down these disgusting warehouses and choose a path rooted in care,” she demanded.

What is happening to our country? What will it take to wake people up?

During the same week I listened to activists planning the May Day walkout, my phone rang and an automated voice informed me that Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson was holding an impromptu “telephone town hall” in the middle of a weekday afternoon. I stayed on and listened to Johnson tell his constituents that he favors eliminating the Senate filibuster in order to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security without the guardrails Democrats are seeking for ICE and Border Patrol. We’re living in too “dangerous” a time not to act immediately, Johnson said, and Congress is “too broken” to make these decisions in a deliberative fashion. That’s why, he explained, now that President Trump is in office and Republicans hold a majority, he has switched his position on ending the minority party’s power to filibuster legislation. Johnson wants to get Democrats out of the way to pass the SAVE America Act, which will severely curtail voting rights on the thoroughly disproven theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in large numbers and swaying U.S. elections. 

Johnson listened approvingly to voters on the call who recycled Trump’s Big Lie that Democrats are stealing elections. He expressed his enthusiasm for RFK Jr. and “progress” on his pet issue — getting rid of supposedly harmful vaccines. Some callers expressed anxiety about the Iran war, with Johnson reassuring them that it was going “perfectly.” One woman swore at him and was disconnected. But the most revealing part of the call came when a caller mentioned that a lot of people are worried about health care — a brewing crisis in Wisconsin where 63,000 people are losing Medicaid coverage because of Trump’s cuts and another 20,000 have dropped their Affordable Care Act coverage because of rising premium costs after Republicans refused to renew ACA enhanced tax credits.

The root cause of the problem with health care, Johnson said, is the government’s involvement. 

“Take a look at Amazon, what that private sector competitor has done to deliver products in hours, sometimes at a really low cost. So private sector consumerism works, but we’ve driven consumerism out of healthcare by having somebody else pay for it,”  he said. His solution? “Move to a rational system of catastrophic care plans, and then most of healthcare paid out of pocket with real consumerism.”

Never mind Johnson’s choice to hold up Amazon as a paragon of business, a company that was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for illegally blocking competition, inflating prices using its monopoly power, and stifling innovation. Never mind the multiple lawsuits brought by its drivers for high-pressure, inhumane working conditions and that unfortunate incident in which a warehouse worker died on the floor while his coworkers were allegedly told by management to ignore him and keep production rolling.

Setting all that aside, how many regular voters in Wisconsin agree that the best way to handle crushing healthcare costs is to make them pay out of pocket for every medication, office visit and procedure?

As Trump’s approval ratings reach a new low and gas prices spike, Johnson’s position that you should cover the full cost of your healthcare out of pocket is unlikely to give Republicans a bump.

The problem in our country is that we seem to have lost the class consciousness that animated the labor movement of the Progressive Era.

Instead, today, we have a right-wing populism that purports to defend the interests of blue collar workers but is, in fact, investing in the immiseration of the vast majority of Americans, the theft of their healthcare, their education, their wages and workplace protections, for the benefit of oligarchs like Johnson, who couldn’t care less if people suffer, sicken and die, so long as he remains rich. 

I don’t think people can put up with this for much longer. The inhumane treatment of regular, hardworking people, the pain and waste of the greed-driven regime we are living with should turn the stomach of every American. 

May Day is a sign of hope. 

The darkened sky in the early afternoon, the tornado sirens wailing as baseball-sized hail shattered windows and dented car roofs, sounding like a series of explosions as drivers hurried home at 4 p.m. last week — all of it felt like the eerie first scene in an apocalyptic movie. 

This is not a drill, I thought, watching the clouds tumbling and boiling overhead as my car radio and my phone began shrieking in unison and a robotic voice informed me that I should take shelter immediately from a tornado that was moving at 20 miles per hour directly toward my neighborhood. 

We’ve all grown accustomed to the low background hum of climate anxiety. Suddenly it’s as loud and immediate as the crack of a giant hailstone on the windshield. 

The changes to the planet we’ve been warned about for decades are suddenly hitting too close to home to ignore. Over the last year in Wisconsin we’ve endured smoke-filled skies from summer forest fires, massive floods, wild temperature swings and scarier, more serious storms. 

This should be a wakeup call. But instead of accelerating efforts to head off climate catastrophe, our federal government is canceling renewable energy contracts and pushing for more coal plants, more oil drilling, more toxic mining on public lands, undoing protections for clean air and water, and accelerating the destruction of our shared environment in order to extract resources and build more wealth for a handful of people in the short term. 

The price of this heedlessness is so enormous it hurts just to think about it. 

Two days after the hail storm and tornado warnings sent me and my neighbors scrambling for cover, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to allow sulfide mining in the Superior National Forest, on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — an inexpressibly beautiful place that is precious to my family, the scene of some of the most formative experiences of our girls’ childhood, and the most visited wilderness area in the U.S. The Forest Service spent years studying how acid mine drainage — the toxic byproduct of sulfide-ore mining — could contaminate the interconnected lakes and streams that make up the Boundary Waters. Once that contamination starts, there is no way to reverse it, which is why an overwhelming majority of Minnesotans weighed in against the mine, and the federal government blocked it. Until that protection was overturned last week.

Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith took a heroic stand on the Senate floor last Wednesday, arguing late into the night, trying to persuade her colleagues not just to hold off on destroying this pristine place, but to forgo using an obscure maneuver that, in a 50-49 vote, redefined land management and knocked down longstanding protections for every piece of national forest in the country. 

My colleague J. Patrick Coolican, editor of the Minnesota Reformer, described Smith pleading to an empty chamber, “I dearly hope the members of this body will think about their legacy in protecting the great places in this country.”

No future president can reinstate the mining ban that protected the Boundary Waters now that Congress used the obscure Congressional Review Act to strike it down. And it’s bigger than that. With their vote to open up mining near the Boundary Waters, “lawmakers have called into question the validity of every management plan issued by the U.S. Forest Service over the past several decades,” Alex Brown of Stateline reports. “That could result in legal chaos for thousands of permits covering logging, grazing, mining and outdoor recreation.” As Smith warned her Republican colleagues who want to protect the public lands they cherish in their home states, their vote means it’s now open season on those lands, too.

I couldn’t bear to talk with my daughters, who have spent every summer they can remember in the Boundary Waters, about the vote last week. 

But this week, Earth Week, it’s time to confront it. All is not lost. Just as they stood up to the masked federal agents who descended on Minneapolis to tear immigrant families apart, Minnesotans are organizing to fight Twin Metals, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chilean mining company Antofagasta, as it seeks state permits to open up its toxic mine. While mining proponents tout the mine as a job creator (ignoring the economic costs of destroying the nation’s most-visited wilderness), the Senate’s action mostly benefits a foreign mining company, which has a history of flouting environmental regulations and creating toxic spills in other countries, and which will likely sell the copper it extracts from Minnesota to China.

The least we Wisconsinites can do is to help our neighbors as they try to repel this deadly invasion and seizure of a priceless natural resource.

Friends of the Boundary Waters, based in Minnesota, is filing a lawsuit arguing that the congressional maneuver that opened up the mine is illegal. The group and its allies are also urging the Minnesota DNR to cancel Twin Metals’ leases for the mine, and pushing the Minnesota state legislature to ban mining in this sensitive area.

As Wisconsin Sen. Gaylor Nelson, the founder of Earth Day put it in his 1970 speech kicking off the modern environmental movement, protecting the environment is “not just an issue of survival, but an issue of how we survive.” 

“Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty,” he said. “….Our goal is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other living creatures. An environment without ugliness, without ghettos, without poverty, without discrimination, without hunger and without war.”

We need to protect that vision of life from the forces of greed and destruction that are engulfing us. We can’t let them write the end of the story.

What are the odds the soon-to-retire Republican leaders of the state Legislature are seriously considering Gov. Tony Evers’ call to end partisan gerrymandering? 

Evers called the special session that began and ended with no action this week, asking legislators to take up a constitutional amendment to ban the practice of drawing voting maps that give a disproportionate advantage to one political party. 

Legislators didn’t exactly refuse — they’ve kicked the can down the road, adjourning temporarily until later this month. As Baylor Spears reports, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu explained that legislators need to “gain public input in order to make an informed decision on how to proceed.” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Majority Leader Tyler August said they want to have more discussions with Evers to reach a “transparent and balanced solution that reflects the interests of all Wisconsinites.” 

Or maybe they just want to run out the clock, do nothing and then blame the governor for their failure to act. 

After all, President Donald Trump, the Republicans’ national leader, has been strong-arming GOP legislators in red states to hold extraordinary mid-decade redistricting sessions to draw him some extra seats to shore up an unpopular Republican House majority. Wisconsin Republicans would be swimming against the tide if they made their last act in office a good-government effort to lock in fair maps. 

Giving up power is not exactly on brand for Wisconsin Republicans. These are the same legislators who drew themselves into the most partisan gerrymandered districts in the country back in 2010. When it came time to draw another round of maps after the 2020 census, they gathered copious public input, holding hearings in which an overwhelming majority of voters told them that they wanted fair maps, and then ignored the public and gerrymandered the maps again. Only after the state Supreme Court declared those maps unconstitutional did they relent and accept 50/50 maps that lean slightly toward Republicans majorities.

Now they’re quitting in droves rather than work in a Legislature where they’ve lost the disproportionate power they conferred on themselves through gerrymandering.

Still, staring down the possibility of Democratic trifecta control of government, it’s possible Republicans could take the long view and try to protect their 50/50 stake before the other party has a shot at redrawing the districts. 

Then again, Republicans have shown very little appetite for that kind of sensible, good-government approach. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this week, Republican legislative leaders are paying private attorneys $550 per hour in taxpayer money to defend their practice of hiring private attorneys at the taxpayers’ expense.

This freewheeling expenditure of your tax dollars follows a lawsuit filed by the public interest law firm Law Forward in February challenging the use of expensive private attorneys by GOP leaders. That practice started in the lame duck session after Evers was first elected, when Republican legislative leaders began frantically grabbing powers from the new Democratic administration. 

“It’s all about an unwillingness to exist within the bounds of checks and balances,” says Jeff Mandell of Law Forward. “It smacks of a sense that the Legislature, and particularly its leadership, is beyond accountability.”

That kind of arrogance is on its way out, along with the legislative leaders who, for more than a decade, treated government as their private club, hoarding power and ignoring the will of the voters. The best way to make sure it never returns is to permanently guarantee fair maps.