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• The Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers have been fighting for control of the administrative rulemaking process since before Evers took office. The rules affect many facets of Wisconsin life, such as water quality.

• The liberal-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled legislative committees can’t indefinitely block rules from taking effect.

• Republicans have instructed the Legislative Reference Bureau not to publish rules that aren’t approved by legislative committees. Evers has filed another lawsuit to address the situation.

Are you worried about toxic algae blooms closing beaches and ruining local lakes? Here’s a story worth following:

Nearly two years ago, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources submitted a rule change to the Legislature that would update policies on preserving the quality of Wisconsin water bodies. The purpose was to bring the state in line with updates the federal government made to the Clean Water Act in 2015. 

At that point in 2023, the DNR had already received feedback from industry and environmental groups, and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed off on the proposed change. But nearly two years later, the update is still making its way through Wisconsin’s administrative rulemaking process. 

The DNR water quality update is among executive agency rule changes swept up in a yearslong political debate over who gets the final say on those policy changes in Wisconsin’s state government.

Evers argues the Republican-led state Legislature has obstructed his administration in delaying rules during legislative committee review periods. Republican legislative leaders counter that their oversight of policies from the executive branch during the rulemaking process is necessary to ensure checks and balances remain in place. 

The debate has made its way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where there has been a liberal majority since 2023. In July, the court ruled the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules lacks the authority to delay publication of rules from executive branch agencies.

In August, the Republican-led Joint Committee on Legislative Organization voted along party lines to direct the Legislative Reference Bureau not to publish administrative rules still going through standing committee reviews. Evers and several executive agencies responded with a Sept. 9 lawsuit filed in Dane County Circuit Court that seeks to force the Legislature to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling from earlier this summer.

There continues to be finger-pointing from different groups about why the DNR’s rule has taken so long to get through the process. Rep. Adam Neylon, R-Pewaukee, a co-chair of the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch that the DNR “has not taken the steps to get it through the process.” DNR declined to comment on the rule, citing ongoing litigation.

In the most recent lawsuit the Evers administration specifically highlighted the DNR’s antidegradation rule, which would require permit holders to justify new or increased pollution discharges into state water bodies.

“Currently, Wisconsin does not apply antidegradation review to all discharges of pollutants, to discharges of stormwater, or to discharges from new concentrated animal feeding operations,” Evers’ lawsuit states. “The long promulgation delay has therefore meant that some discharges that this proposed rule would cover have not been and are not being evaluated, risking the degradation of surface water quality.”

The rule is scheduled for a public hearing before the Assembly’s Committee on Environment on Thursday at the Capitol, the second time the change will be heard before that committee this year. 

Environmental advocates say the delay means Wisconsin’s water antidegradation policy remains below minimum federal standards, jeopardizing Wisconsin lakes and rivers.

For example, a pollutant like phosphorus, which is found in farm fertilizers, can cause toxic blue-green algae when discharged into water bodies, said Tony Wilkin Gibart, the executive director of Midwest Environmental Advocates. That’s “an important consequence” for Wisconsinites who live near a lake or river, he said. 

Erik Kanter, the government relations director for Clean Wisconsin, called the delay a “good example” of a “broken process” in state government. 

“It was an easy thing, just trying to comply with federal law,” Kanter said. “And it became this political football lost in this complicated process.” 

How we got here 

The administrative rules debate has pitted business and private property interests against administrative attempts to boost public health and environmental protections. The rules are written by executive branch agencies to fill in the details of laws passed by the Legislature and governor.

But Republicans have long decried the rules as bureaucratic red tape, rallying voters during their 2010 takeover of state government with promises to make Wisconsin “open for business.” Assembly Republicans, led by Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, launched a “Right the Rules” project to streamline administrative rules during the 2010s, but it hit a crescendo when Evers defeated former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the 2018 governor’s race.

In the weeks before he left office, Walker signed legislation that sought to strip power from the incoming governor and attorney general. Those laws gave the Legislature authority to block or delay administrative rules that come from executive agencies, such as the DNR. 

After liberals gained a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, recent opinions have dialed back some of the Legislature’s power over the executive branch. In 2024, the court ruled that a legislative committee could not block DNR spending for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program. Then in July, the court sided with Evers when it ruled a legislative committee could not block executive agency rules from going into effect following approval from the governor. 

The July opinion specifically highlighted delayed administrative rule proposals on banning conversion therapy and updating Wisconsin’s commercial building code. Prior to the court’s July decision, the Legislative Reference Bureau could not publish administrative rules until legislative committees reviewed and acted on the changes. 

In a Sept. 12 video posted on social media, Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, argued lawmakers’ review of executive agency rules is necessary before some of the Evers administration’s proposals essentially become law. She slammed a recent proposal from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to raise fees on animal markets, dealers and truckers. One animal market registration fee, according to the proposed rule, would increase from $420 to $7,430. 

“Evers and his unelected bureaucrats are going to implement their ideology through administrative rules, knowing that the leftists on the Supreme Court shockingly gave them a green light,” Felzkowski said in the video.

Wisconsin’s fight over administrative rules sounds wonky, but it affects important issues like water quality and public health is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Back in her clowning years, Karen DeSanto got a call from the king of Morocco.

“We hung up on him,” she said. “We thought it was one of our friends pranking us.”

It was actually employees of the consulate, but the king wanted them. DeSanto and her then-husband were both professional clowns with the Ringling Brothers, and they also performed as a duo.

Somehow, King Hassan II had heard about the DeSantos, and he flew them in on his private jet to perform for his granddaughter’s birthday at his palace in the capital city of Rabat.

His royal majesty, sitting on his throne in the middle of a room, loved their performance. The little girl? Not so much.

“She hated it,” DeSanto said with a chuckle. “That was our first and only birthday party.”

Clowning has taken DeSanto all around the country and the world, from the most opulent spaces of Carnegie Hall to much humbler places — she has used a pig barn to change into costume before performing in a rural field — and now, to the Wisconsin State Capitol.

A longtime Baraboo native, she was elected to the state Assembly in 2024 after heading the Boys & Girls Club of West Central Wisconsin for more than a decade.

But it’s been a long journey on the circus train — both literally and figuratively — to get here.

Running away with the circus

Born in Sacramento, DeSanto, now 61, said she dreamed of seeing the world. Her father took her to see the circus every summer, and young Karen would go every day it was in town, so much that the clowns recognized her and even roped her into the act, pulling her out of the crowd to perform gags with them.

Her father was a big part of her life, she said, and she was his caregiver when he got sick in his early 60s. While sitting in the waiting room during one of his appointments, DeSanto came across an ad for clown college in a magazine. She tore it out and shoved it into a pocket. After her father died a few months later, when she was 27, she found herself “itching to do something different” with her life, so she auditioned.

“I’m a big believer in saying yes,” she said. “The world just opened up to me after that.”

After graduation, DeSanto got one of the few contracts offered to a female clown by the Ringling Brothers.

She lived and traveled on the circus train, where her quarters were next to the elephant car. The friendly beasts would reach their trunks to her window to grab bananas from her hand. One of the elephants she rode during performances was also named Karen, and she reunited with her friendly steed years later at the zoo where it had retired. DeSanto swears the much larger Karen remembered her.

She married another clown after meeting her husband under the Big Top. They toured the big-city circuit, visiting places like New York and Los Angeles, as well as the rodeo route, which took them to smaller cities, including Waco, Texas, and Erie, Pennsylvania.

One of her first brushes with politics came in 1995, when DeSanto and her comrades performed for then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, future presidential candidate and then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and other politicians in the parking lot of the U.S. Capitol. Gingrich had asked the Ringling Brothers, already in town for a few nights, to perform outside the halls of Congress to celebrate the company’s 125th anniversary. The entertainers executed the famous elephant long mount, where the massive animals line up, place their hooves on the pachyderm in front and pose.

“I have great stories of kings and queens and all in betweens,” DeSanto said. “You name it, we’ve done it.”

The Boys and Girls Club

Eventually, the DeSantos bought a home near the Ringling Brothers headquarters in Baraboo, where they worked as the resident clowns for the Circus World Museum, and raised their daughter Emily, now 27.

In 2012, DeSanto left the circus to work for the Boys & Girls Clubs of West-Central Wisconsin, most of it as CEO.

In her time there, she led the revamp of the financially failing organization, which included clubs in Baraboo and Tomah, putting it on firmer ground, she said. DeSanto also oversaw the expansion of new clubs in Reedsburg and Portage.

She and her staff made the organization self-sustaining by tapping into moms and dads, local businesses and philanthropic organizations like the United Way, she said. They connected with their elected officials, like state Rep. Dave Considine, a Democrat from Baraboo, and pursued state and federal grants to help fund their after-school programs for rural kids.

“I’m just going to toot the horn that our clubs were the rural footprint for the nation,” she said. “But don’t get me wrong, it was always a struggle.”

She retired in 2024 from the Boys and Girls Club, but another interesting challenge arose for the versatile performer. And DeSanto found herself saying “yes” once again.

The Wisconsin Assembly

After Considine announced he would not seek reelection in 2024, he went about recruiting several Democratic candidates so his constituents could have options, he said.

DeSanto, with whom Considine had worked to secure some grant funding, was one of his picks.

“She’s really good in front of people. She knows people really well,” he said of DeSanto. “I think she also is a really strong fighter for individual rights. It was all about fighting for people to have the right to be successful and happy.”

Having worked at her existing clubs and helped to launch the new ones, DeSanto said she got to know the district and the people who live and work there.

She saw how important institutions like schools and the health care system were to the well-being of rural communities and knew she could be an advocate.

“I felt I had the chops, I felt I had the experience, I felt I knew my communities quite well,” she said. “That’s why I threw my hat in the ring.”

And in an era where money is so rampant in politics, her fundraising background couldn’t hurt either.

A three-candidate race emerged in the primary, and some voices, mostly online, tried to “weaponize” her background against her, DeSanto said, suggesting a clown didn’t belong in the Wisconsin Legislature.

Considine had prepared her for that.

“One of the first things I said was ‘Karen, don’t run from it.’ Embrace it and run on it,” he said. “And she did and I think she ran a really good race.”

The circus is quite popular in the district, DeSanto said, noting that the Ringling Brothers had grown up in Baraboo and made it their home base of their internationally renowned organization.

The criticisms backfired. She cruised to victory, winning more than 53% of the vote in the primary, a greater share than the other two candidates combined. DeSanto won the general election with more than 54% of the vote against a Republican challenger. The district had become more friendly to Democrats in the most recent round of redistricting.

About half a year into her 2-year term, in which her party is in the minority and thus unable to do much without GOP support, DeSanto has been a sponsor on a couple bills, including ones that would provide free, healthy school meals, lower prescription drugs and expand the homestead tax credit, but Republicans looking to cut spending stripped those from the budget.

She cast one of her first contentious “no” votes last month on the state budget negotiated by legislative Republicans in the majority, Gov. Tony Evers and state Senate Democrats, saying it did not do enough on issues important to her district, like affordable housing expansion, broadband access and public school funding.

Asked what she’s hoping to accomplish in her first term, DeSanto said, “I really am concentrating on listening, and absorbing what this Legislature is, and how the state Capitol works.”

“People say the Legislature is a circus, and I say ‘no, it’s not,’” she said with a chuckle. “The circus starts and ends on time. The people there are talented and kind and friendly.”

Another one she hears is that “government is a bunch of clowns,” an assertion with which she vehemently disagrees.

“Clowns are highly trained individuals, and they can do just about anything,” DeSanto said. “And they take their craft very seriously. And they bring joy and happiness.”

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

From one circus to another: Professional clown serving in Wisconsin Legislature is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.