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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sen. Ron Johnson via official Facebook page

Back during President Donald Trump’s first administration, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was known as Trump’s most reliable ally in the U.S. Senate. He led investigations into Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton and alleged irregularities in the 2020 election that Trump lost. A proponent of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines and climate science, Johnson is not one of those Republicans who had to overcome principle to get in line behind Trump. 

He is completely at ease with the new administration — including the pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, battered police officers and sought to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence. The blanket pardon for the rioters, including those convicted of violent crimes, was “maybe a little more sweeping than I wanted to see,” he averred during a Politico breakfast this week. But, overall, Johnson said, the Jan. 6 defendants were victims of a “grotesque miscarriage of justice.” So Trump was right to pardon them.

If ever Johnson struggles to go along with Trump’s more out-there ideas, like slapping huge tariffs on imports that could devastate Wisconsin businesses and farms, he just figures he must not truly, deeply understand their wisdom. 

“When I don’t necessarily agree with him, I always ask myself, what am I not seeing here?” he told Politico’s Zach Warmbrodt. Like any good enabler, Johnson figures Trump must have some extra-tricky reason for doing harm that actually makes what he’s doing good. 

That kind of thinking will come in handy during the next four years. It could prove particularly useful to Trump as he tries to hold together supporters drawn to his promises to lift up the working class — the “forgotten men and women of America” — and tech billionaires including Elon Musk who want to liquidate the safety net, drive down wages and establish a permanent American oligarchy.

Johnson embraces white grievance and the racist, right-wing populist “replacement theory”— suggesting Democrats want more immigrants to cross the southern border and come to the U.S. to “change the makeup of the electorate” — but he is also fully, cheerfully on board with oligarchy. 

Nothing suits Johnson better than the Trump administration’s plan to cut taxes for the very rich and slash entitlements to pay for it.

This was the gist of his appearance at the Politico breakfast this week, where he was introduced as someone who will have “a big role” in tax battle, having played “a very important role” in Trump’s 2017 tax cut. 

Johnson basked in the glow, recalling how he held up the whole 2017 law until he managed to shoehorn in a big tax cut for “pass-through corporations” Johnson confirmed that he personally benefited from the change in the tax code that he pushed through in 2017. He cast the deciding vote for Trump’s tax code rewrite giving corporations tax cuts worth $1.4 billion — but only after he arm-twisted Trump and Congress into including special benefits for so-called “pass-through” corporations — companies like his own PACUR plastics firm — whose profits are distributed to their owners. A few months later, Johnson began the process of selling his company, reaping the benefits of the tax law change, which increased the value of pass-through companies and made him more money on the sale.

According to Politifact, “Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that ultra-wealthy Americans have received billions in tax savings stemming from that deduction, while those earning less have gotten less of a break.”  The news organization cites one study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found the top 1% of Americans received nearly 60% of the tax savings created by the provision, with most of that amount going to the top 0.1%.

“I made sure all the passthroughs got a tax cut, that was my contribution,” Johnson said. 

“Whatever we do, we need to make it permanent,” Johnson said of the individual income and estate tax provisions of the 2017 Trump tax law. That law was heavily skewed to the rich. Households with incomes in the top 1% will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60%, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Thanks to the law, revenue as a share of GDP has fallen from about 19.5% in the Bush years to just 16.3% in the years immediately following the Trump tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That leaves commitments to Social Security and health care benefits for retirees in jeopardy, the Center concludes.

Nor did the tax cut yield the big benefits Trump projected. ​​New research shows that workers who earned less than about $114,000 on average in 2016 saw “no change in earnings” from the corporate tax rate cut, while top executive salaries increased sharply, the Center reports. “Similarly, rigorous research concluded that the tax law’s 20% pass-through deduction, which was skewed in favor of wealthy business owners, has largely failed to trickle down to workers in those companies who aren’t owners.”

Yet making those tax cuts permanent is among the “top priorities” for Congress and the new administration, Johnson said. His biggest contribution to the next tax debate will be his push to rewrite the tax code and “keep it simple,” and cut spending to pay for more cuts. 

“We have to return spending levels to some reasonable pre-pandemic levels,” he told the audience at the Politico breakfast. Building Trump’s border wall and keeping low taxes that benefit the very rich are the top two priorities for government, Johnson said.

Everyone would be able to see the wisdom of that program, as long you “keep it simple,” he added. The formula he laid out was “eliminate expenditures” and then you can dramatically cut rates. 

He wants to “free corporations from all this complexity in the tax code,” he said, adding he favors “a corporate tax rate of zero.”

Health care and Social Security, though? Not so much.“Stop trying to socially and economically engineer through the tax system,” Johnson advised. 

Let the rich keep their money. Slash the safety net. It’s simple.