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The co-founder of Wisconsin’s progressive, pro-democracy law firm is not ignoring the tsunami of bad news out of Washington. He’s just not letting it drown his optimism. 

“I don’t think any of us fully anticipated how heavy, broad, fast and extreme the onslaught was going to be,” Jeff Mandell concedes, referring to President Donald Trump’s moves to seize unprecedented power, weaponize the federal government against his political enemies, defy court orders, deport people without due process and throw the entire global economy into chaos.

“Some of what we are seeing and hearing is so contrary to our most fundamental understanding of what we believe about our government, I have to believe this is temporary and that people won’t stand for it,” Mandell says.

Since its founding in October 2020, Law Forward has pursued high-profile lawsuits that have helped claw back democracy in Wisconsin. The firm challenged the state’s now-defunct gerrymandered voting maps and uncovered the details of the fake electors scheme that originated here — forcing the Republican officials who posed as members of the Electoral College and cast fraudulent votes for Trump in 2020 to admit they were trying to subvert the will of the voters. On the public website it created to display the details of the scheme, which it obtained as a condition of a settlement, Law Forward stated that it wanted to show “how close our democracy came to toppling and how the freedom to vote must continue to be protected, not taken for granted.”

This week, Law Forward’s grievance against former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman for misconduct in his ill-conceived “investigation” of voter fraud in the 2020 election led to the suspension of Gableman’s law license.

As a Wisconsin-based organization, Mandell says Law Forward looks for opportunities to pursue cases that are of particular importance to the state and that shine a light on threats to democracy.

“The rest of the time we don’t sit in paralysis because of the news,” he adds. Whatever fresh hell is erupting across the country, “we continue to work here so people see an alternative.” 

“I think building a stronger, more resilient democracy in Wisconsin is its own form of resistance,” he adds.

“When things feel most shocking and unstable at the federal level,” at the state and local level, Mandell says, “we can show our institutions still work and provide some reassurance.” 

Even before Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel last week in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race — despite the heavy-handed intervention of Trump and Elon Musk — Mandell was feeling hopeful. He felt Wisconsin showed a “silver lining” after the November 2024 election, despite Trump’s narrow win in the state.

Among his reasons for optimism: New, fair voting maps that replaced the old Republican gerrymander, creating a more balanced Legislature; a governor who supports voting rights and democratic institutions; extraordinarily high voter engagement, with Wisconsinites turning out in bigger numbers than in other states in 2024 and overwhelmingly rejecting the MAGA-backed Supreme Court candidate in 2025. 

With Crawford’s win, “Wisconsin will continue to be a place where we can rely on the courts to protect our fundamental freedoms,” Mandell says.

The 10-point margin in last week’s election also “reinforces my conviction that the majority of Wisconsinites really do believe in democracy,” Mandell says.

All of those things position Wisconsin to be a leader in the struggle to protect democracy from the Trump onslaught.

Wisconsin’s long march to recovery from misrule by Gov. Scott Walker and the rightwing billionaires who backed him has been taking us in the opposite direction from the rest of the country.

Along with his union-busting Act 10 — challenged by Law Forward and soon to be taken up by the Wisconsin Supreme Court — Walker took a sledgehammer to funding for public education, long before Trump and Musk arrived with their chainsaws. Voters here have been pushing back against the billionaire-financed destruction of civil society for more than a decade. Recently, they’ve been gaining traction. Law Forward has played an important role in that fight.

It’s not just that Democrats will pick up more seats in the state Legislature as the un-gerrymandered maps go into full effect next year, Mandell has hope that our closely divided state will maintain its longstanding independence and commitment to bipartisan institutions. He draws encouragement from the fact that Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee are holding budget hearings around the state, even as Republicans in Washington ram through a budget based on Trump’s demands, ignoring the public and ceding their power as members of Congress.

Wisconsin’s long tradition of good government includes a host of bipartisan commissions, a decentralized elections system that is hard to hack and a great university that has managed to survive waves of attacks by McCarthyites and budget cutters for 176 years.

That tradition extends to a bipartisan nominating commission for federal judges, which ought to choose a replacement for 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Sykes, who announced in March that she is taking semi-retirement. Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s office reports it has been in contact with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s office to reconstitute the charter for the bipartisan nominating commission, as they have done in every Congress under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump could still ignore the process and nominate someone on his own. But three weeks after Sykes’ announcement, he hasn’t done it yet.

If Trump wrecks the economy and steers the whole country into a recession, Wisconsin won’t be spared. Nor can we avoid all the shocks of a national authoritarian regime. But our state’s independent democratic institutions leave us well situated to recover, and to help the rest of the country remember what civil society looks like.

“There is no one silver bullet,” says Mandell. “But the goal is to continue to tend the lamp here in Wisconsin, to shine a light that illuminates the path to balance, order and democracy.”