Sen. Jeff Smith holding up a printout of President Donald Trump's post telling people to buy, which went out just hours before he paused most tariffs. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Democrats are resurrecting a resolution that would allow voters to weigh in on whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling should stand — an effort that comes just a week after historic spending in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to speech and laws preventing them from spending were unconstitutional. The decision has enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money on elections. 

Lawmakers said the decision is the core of why spending has gotten so out of hand in the last decade and a half. According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, preliminary data shows that nearly $100 million was spent during the April race between Justice-elect Susan Crawford and Brad Schimel.

At a press conference, Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) called billionaire Elon Musk — who has directed efforts in the Trump administration to slash federal programs and fire federal employees and spent millions trying to influence the outcome of the Wisconsin  Supreme Court — a “carpetbagger.” He criticized Musk for giving money to voters, saying Wisconsinites shouldn’t get accustomed to being paid to vote, but should be voting to make their voices heard.

Smith said money in elections is making voters feel like billionaires are outweighing their voices. He then called specific attention to President Donald Trump telling investors to ‘buy’ on social media — as the stock market was wavering — just hours before he announced that for 90 days he would be lowering U.S. tariffs to 10% on most countries and raising them on China to 125%. The move caused the stock market to rise and, then led to accusations of market manipulation and insider trading. 

“The man in the White House sent this message — ‘A great time to buy! A great time to buy.’ He sent his message to his rich donors and friends,” Smith said. 

“It pays off to put millions of dollars in campaigns because they’re going to make money in the end if they win,” Smith continued. “We need Congress to reevaluate this role of corporations and billionaires and their role in money and politics.”

The advisory referendum would seek an answer from voters on whether Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation should support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. Specifically it would ask voters the question whether “only human beings are endowed with constitutional rights — not corporations, unions, nonprofit organizations, or other artificial entities” and whether “money is not speech, and therefore limiting political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.”

Smith said voters sent a message that they won’t be bought last week by rejecting Musk’s preferred candidate.

“We don’t want that money coming in here in Wisconsin to buy our elections and our freedom,” Smith said. “Let’s put this referendum on the ballots, so voters can make their voices heard directly to Congress.

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign Operations and Policy Director Beverly Speer emphasized at the press conference that the issue goes beyond Musk, saying that spending by independent expenditures —  totaling about $51.5 million in April — are often backed by billionaires and operated in shady ways.

“Don’t be mistaken, Musk is just one of a handful of billionaires who contributed to this bipartisan arms race,” Speer said. “Things will continue to escalate… Unless we want to see a $150 million race, and then maybe a $200 million race, we need to cut off this free-for-all.”  

Speer said that voters are mostly opposed to the vast spending in campaigns. 

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign conducted a survey in February that found about 88% of Wisconsin voters statewide are “extremely concerned” or “very concerned” about the influence of money in politics. The survey also found that 86% of respondents said people and groups shouldn’t be able to spend “unlimited amounts of money” to support political campaigns and 83% of respondents said there should be limits on how much campaigns can spend.

“While working Wisconsinites stretch to pay rent, feed their families, and make ends meet, billionaires treat our elections like a game — pouring millions into a state that they don’t even normally live in, hoping to tip the scales in favor of their special interests,” Speer said. 

A statewide referendum would need to pass the Republican-led Legislature, and Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) acknowledged that previous attempts have been unsuccessful. She said she welcomes more conversation about the issue and proposal.

“Not once has it even gotten a hearing, and you know, why? Because politicians who are beholden to big money in politics don’t want to hear what the people have to say about it, but we are calling on… our colleagues to join us in this resolution,” Subeck said. 

Subeck said lawmakers were starting with the referendum because any changes in state law are “neutered” by the Citizens United decision. She said Democrats would be introducing more bills to address the issue in the near future, including on disclosure of money in campaigns and on public financing. However, she said pushing Congress for a constitutional amendment will be key to changing the state of money in elections. 

“We cannot fundamentally make wholesale change in this through any state law as long as Citizens United is still law of the land,” Subeck said. “We need to amend our federal Constitution and we need to send that message clear and simple.”

A Wisconsin Democracy Campaign poll finds nearly 90% of voters say they're concerned about the influence of money in politics. (Getty Images)

After an April  election that broke national  records for spending, Wisconsin voters are eager to see measures to rein in money in politics, a campaign finance watchdog group leader said Monday.

“It is an environment where billionaires are running the show and everyday people like you and me are here watching,” said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “We will continue to see unprecedented spending unless something changes from our Legislature and our lawmakers.”

The numbers that the organization posted Monday haven’t yet pierced the predicted $100 million threshold in the Supreme Court race, but final data won’t be compiled until the end of June. The Democracy Campaign focuses on the money actually spent, as distinct from what was raised or what was budgeted, said research director Sam DeForest-Davis.

As of Monday morning, the campaign for Judge Susan Crawford, who won the Court race, spent $22 million compared with the campaign for Judge Brad Schimel, which spent just under $10 million.

While the campaigns spent a combined $32 million, independent groups supporting the campaigns spent a combined $51 million. Schimel was the larger beneficiary of independent spending, with $33.5 million in his favor or opposing Crawford. Independent spending that favored Crawford or opposed Schimel totaled $18 million.

In the race for state superintendent, the two candidates’ campaigns — for  incumbent Jill Underly, who won, and for her challenger, Brittany Kinser — were just about even in their spending, with $1.3 million for Underly and $1.1 million for Kinser.

Independent spending, however, heavily favored Underly at $1.9 million. Independent spending for Kinser totaled $160,000.

Research director DeForest-Davis said the organization will have a final report in July on spending data, including spending on issue ads that don’t include explicit messages to vote for or against a candidate but are slanted to clearly favor one or the other. That information won’t be available until the end of June. 

Along with the campaign finance data released Monday, the Democracy Campaign released results from an opinion poll of Wisconsin voters on campaign finance.

The survey, of 861 voters conducted from Feb. 11-14, found that 88% of participants were “very concerned” or “extremely concerned” about the influence of money in politics.

“I have a hard time thinking of an issue that has this kind of universal feedback across the state,” Ramos said. “After seeing the gaudy amount of money that was spent in this Supreme Court race, I can only imagine that this number and this percentage are going to increase.”

Nearly as many — more than 85% — said “no” when asked if individuals or groups should be able to spend “unlimited amounts of money” to support political campaigns.  And 83% said there should be limits on how much campaigns can spend.

Nearly 74% said they would support a ban on campaign spending “by outside political action committees (PACs) that are not directly affiliated with a candidate’s campaign.” About 53% ranked spending by “dark money PACS who do not have to disclose their donors” as their greatest concern where the influence of money on politics is concerned.

Another question showed that so far publicly financed campaigns haven’t gained support from a majority of voters. Almost 47% said they would “strongly” or “somewhat” support such a proposal. Just under 30% said they would “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose public financing, while 23.5% said they were unsure.

Demonstrators protest outside the KI Convention Center before the start of a town hall meeting with Elon Musk on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It turns out Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is not so powerful after all. 

Musk’s gambit in Wisconsin — dumping more than $20 million into a nominally nonpartisan Supreme Court race, blanketing the airwaves with negative ads, paying people to sign petitions against “activist judges” and cavorting in Green Bay wearing a cheesehead hat while handing out million-dollar checks to Republican voters — didn’t help, and likely hurt, his chosen candidate in an election Musk described as crucial to “the course of Western civilization” and “the entire destiny of humanity.”

Poor Brad Schimel, whose campaign Musk took over. At his victory party in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha, where he underperformed Trump’s 2024 vote tally, setting up his quick downhill slide, Schimel sat strumming a guitar as the results came in showing that Susan Crawford trounced him by a whopping 10 points. 

After proclaiming that he got into the race because he was disgusted by the Court’s “partisanship,” Schimel ended up promising to be a “support network” for Trump and stood by as Musk became his biggest donor and the public face of his campaign. At some point Tuesday evening he may have begun to regret that approach. Trump himself seems to be rethinking Musk after the debacle in Wisconsin, reportedly telling his inner circle that his billionaire adviser won’t be around much longer.

Other Republicans would be wise to get the message that “Elon Musk is politically toxic, that he is a massive anchor that will drag Republicans to the bottom of the ocean,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the Examiner during Crawford’s victory party. 

Wisconsin voters are not alone in recoiling from Musk as he takes a chainsaw to federal health care programs and Social Security, gleefully slashing the safety net to fund giant tax breaks for a handful of super-rich people like himself. In 10 Wisconsin counties where Trump won in 2024, voters rejected Musk’s entreaties to support Schimel, delivering a majority of votes to Crawford. That included Republican-leaning Brown County, where Musk campaigned in his cheesehead hat.

“I think the whole country is going to know unmistakably that Musk and Trump have crossed line after line after line, and the blowback has begun,” said Wikler. “Wisconsin is a bellwether state. Whoever wins Wisconsin probably wins the country, and Trump and Musk just lost decisively. At this point, every Republican who hasn’t yet spoken out against Elon Musk is going to have to think through whether they want to stay in public life or they want this to be their final term in office.”

But don’t count on Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to do any of that sort of hard thinking. Johnson told Lawrence Andrea of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Musk was “net beneficial” to Schimel, and that his 10-point loss might have been even bigger without Musk’s help. Likewise Wisconsin Right Now declared that there was no lesson to be learned from Schimel’s loss and chalked it up to the inevitable backlash by angry liberals to Trump and Musk’s bravery. 

That kind of analysis bodes well for Democrats.

After Tuesday, the liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is secure for another three years, just as it is poised to decide key cases on abortion, labor rights and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps. Celebrating on stage with Crawford at the Park Hotel in Madison Tuesday night were the other women who make up that majority, including Justices Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz, who each won the last two Supreme Court elections by 10 points or more against a right-wing opponent, just as Crawford did. 

In all three races a key issue was Wisconsin women’s right to control their own bodies, with voters decisively rejecting candidates who embraced a dangerous near-total abortion ban. In all three races money also played an outsized role — a growing threat to voters’ ability to make their voices heard over the din of deceptive big-money ads. If we are going to reclaim the Court from the corrupting influence of self-interested donors like Musk — who is currently pursuing a lawsuit to try to overturn a Wisconsin law that prevents him from selling Teslas directly to consumers — we need to put an end to the campaign finance arms race.

But for now the most important lesson of the 2025 Supreme Court race is that voters can stand up to the mind-boggling spree of destruction by MAGA nihilists. 

Musk’s failure to buy a seat on the Court should encourage people across the country to believe in themselves and their ability to resist the authoritarian bullies who are targeting civil society, flouting the law, trampling our rights and trying to rule by intimidation and the sheer force of their money.

It didn’t work in Wisconsin. That’s a good sign.

At a protest on Saturday at the Capitol in Madison, a man who asked to be identified only as Tony said he was worried about cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

It was a blustery, grey Saturday afternoon on March 15 as about 40 people wearing togas, carrying signs and waving upside-down American flags gathered on the steps of the Capitol in Madison to protest Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the current administration’s assault on democracy. 

The Madison rally, part of a loosely organized nationwide effort launched by the 5051 Movement, was one in a series of 50 protests held in 50 states on a specific day. The theme on this day was the “Ides of March” — hence the togas and signs denouncing Trump and Musk as American Caesars.

“I am tired of bullies in our state and in our national government,” said a white-haired man who asked to be identified by only his first name, Tony. “I think they’ve lost the whole idea of what our government is all about.” Threatened cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to repel Russia’s invasion were among the issues that brought him to the protest.

“I’m old,” said Ann Kimber, 70, explaining why she showed up to the Capitol in her wheelchair. “I get Medicare. My daughter’s on Medicaid. And I know some people who need their VA benefits. I want people to know we’re concerned they might go away.”

Kimber organized a Facebook group of Fitchburg seniors, she said, because she felt there was nothing happening to resist the dangerous assault on the federal government by the Trump administration. She was optimistic that protests were having an effect, causing the administration to backtrack on some of its planned cuts. “I think each group that has some stake in the matter should be out there protesting all the time,” she said.

Kimber recalled the massive 2011 protests against former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose attack on public employee unions and drastic cuts to education propelled tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to mount historic rallies at the Capitol. She said she thought Trump and Musk, like Walker, would suffer an inevitable public backlash because of their arrogance, acting like kings. “If they would have been a little more subtle about it they would get farther,” she said. 

Madison, home to one of the top research institutions in the country, stands to lose $65 millions as Trump takes a meat cleaver to National Institutes of Health funding, with dire ripple effects for the state’s economy and for critical progress on everything from curing childhood cancer to dementia.

But unlike the 2011 Wisconsin uprising against Walker, the public response to the stunning aggression of Trump and Musk has been eerily quiet. Some of the Madison protesters said they thought too many people were intimidated about speaking out, especially after the high-profile arrest of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil, who was taken from his apartment in New York earlier this month and held under threat of deportation at a detention center in Louisiana.

“If they’re gonna start arresting people for the stuff they say … that’s fascism 101,” said Julie Mankowski, who helped organize the Madison event and showed up wearing a king-size bedsheet. “When the first person disappears, if there’s not enough outrage, it becomes no resistance at all, just fear,” she added.

People of various ages and backgrounds joined the march, including “a lot of faces I haven’t seen,” said Mankowski, “a lot of people with diverse concerns, but the real theme seems to be this is not what our country is about.”

After chanting on the State Street corner of the Capitol for a while, the group made a lap of the Capitol square, flags flying, led by a cheerful young man with a megaphone who chanted, “Fascists out of the White House!”

A couple of self-appointed marshals stopped at each intersection, facing traffic as the group crossed the street. One young man had a handgun in a holster on his hip and a “defend equality” patch on his shoulder with the image of a military-style assault rifle against an LGBTQ pride flag. The jarring suggestion of violence was muted by the jolly mood of the gathering. Cars honked and passers-by accepted handbills promoting free speech.

The Ides of March theme had shifted to free speech, explained Carrie McClung, another toga-clad protest organizer, after Khalil’s arrest.  “I hope more people start coming out,” McClung added. “I know people are frustrated. I know people are angry. And I hope it encourages people — this is our right to be out here.” 

The first popular test of the Trump/Musk regime will take place in Wisconsin on April 1, in a state Supreme Court race Musk has spent millions to try to buy. Some protesters carried signs supporting Judge Susan Crawford in that race and opposing Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel. The race has garnered national attention since,  as The Wall Street Journal reports, it will show whether Musk could be a political liability for Republicans.

Buoyed by all the honks of encouragement and  thumbs-up from passing pedestrians, the Madison protesters wound up back on the corner of State Street where they bopped to tunes on a boom box.

While Democrats and much of the public have been too shocked and disoriented by the scale of Trump’s assault on democracy to react, the ragtag group stood out in the wind, trying to spark a movement. 

In fact, this spring, signs of a bigger backlash have begun to appear, including a 3,500-person rally with Bernie Sanders at UW-Parkside in Kenosha earlier this month, where an additional 500 people were reportedly turned away from a packed arena. Videos of Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour have gone viral. The same weekend as the small Ides of March Madison protest,  I heard a gravelly Brooklyn accent coming through my teenager’s bedroom door.

“From the bottom of my heart, I am convinced that they can be beaten,” Sanders said of the billionaires taking a chainsaw to the social safety net and Hoovering up the wealth of our nation. “Despair is not an option.”

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are busy smashing the state. Wisconsinites will have a chance to weigh in on candidates who support and oppose the anti-government crusade on April 1. | Getty Images Creative

Wisconsinites voted for Donald Trump by a narrow margin in November. Does that mean a majority of voters here want to cancel farmers’ federal contracts, shut down Head Start centers across the state and turn loose Elon Musk to feed federal agencies into the woodchipper while hoovering up private citizens’ financial information?

The new Trump era is putting Republican nihilism to the test. In our closely divided swing state, the first official indication of whether Trump voters are developing buyers’ remorse will come, fittingly, on April Fool’s Day. 

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, candidate Brad Schimel has received Elon Musk’s endorsement and is benefitting from a huge ad buy by Musk’s political action committee. And while some Republicans have expressed qualms about Trump and Musk’s assertions that they have unchecked power to ride roughshod over judges and the U.S. Constitution, Schimel has, notably, sided with Trump and Musk against the courts. 

Last month, Schimel took to Vicki McKenna’s rightwing talk radio show to denounce the prosecution and sentencing of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost in 2020, saying juries in Washington, D.C., were too liberal to deliver a fair verdict. Recently, on the same talk radio program, he criticized federal judges for blocking the ransacking of federal agencies by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accusing the judges of “acting corruptly” by daring to issue temporary restraining orders.

The race between Schimel and Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will determine the ideological balance of the Court and, it seems, whether a majority of justices believe in the integrity of the court system at all. 

Also on the April 1 ballot is the race for state schools superintendent, which pits a lobbyist for the private school voucher industry against a defender of public schools — an existential choice as the growth of schools vouchers is on track to bankrupt our state’s public school system and enrollment caps on voucher programs are set to come off next year.

The ideological struggle over the future of our state was on stark display this week as Gov. Tony Evers presented his budget plan — an expansive vision that uses the state surplus to boost funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin, health care, clean water and rural infrastructure, and leaves a cushion to help protect communities against what Evers called the “needless chaos caused by the federal government” under Trump.

In a familiar ritual, Republican legislators immediately shot down Evers’ plan, denounced it as “reckless spending” and promised to throw it in the trash and replace it with a stripped-down alternative based on austerity and tax cuts.

“Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump and his agenda to cut spending and find inefficiency in government,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared.

But did they? 

It’s not clear that most Wisconsinites wanted what Trump and Musk are delivering — cuts to health care and veterans’ services, the claw-back of infrastructure projects, mass firings at the park service and the chaotic suspension of promised federal funds for child care and other essential services in Wisconsin.

For generations, Republicans have complained about “red tape” and “big government” and promised “freedom” and lower taxes to constituents who liked the sound of all that. Under Trump, we are seeing anti-government ideology reach its full, unchecked fruition. Trump’s No. 1 private donor, the richest man in the world, is laughing all the way to the bank. He’s using his access to trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds to cancel food programs for poor children and to bolster federal contracts that enrich himself. 

This, in the end, is what privatization is all about — taking the collective wealth of millions of people who contribute to maintaining a decent, healthy society and concentrating it in the hands of one very rich, self-interested man.

The long-term, existential struggle between private wealth and the public good in Wisconsin includes the fight over whether to fund public schools or give away money to subsidize the tuition of private school families. It includes whether to be the second-to-last state to finally offer 12 months of postpartum Medicaid coverage to new mothers — something even our Republican legislators support, minus Vos. The two sides of our divided government are locked in a battle over whether our universities, public parks, infrastructure, clean water and affordable housing are a boondoggle or something we ought to protect. 

Given what’s happening to our country, Wisconsinites will have to think hard about which side they’re on.