WISC 3
ESTB 2 25
SOME BAK
SEE CLETA CPI VOTER SUPPRESS
see WASTE FRAUD BS JDV SOMalian ref
==
THREE 2 25
see main earlier, tag WI
voter suppression bigly state scotus
see wisc scotus
===
AN 7 26
Lawyers trying to mount a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk and America PAC, a super PAC he funded to support President Donald Trump and other conservatives, say the defendants aren’t cooperating in turning over key documents.
“We’re getting the run-around,” said attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who is based in Massachusetts. “We’ve been delayed in getting discovery.”
The cases against Musk and America PAC stem from a promise to pay $47 for every successful referral of a registered swing state voter to sign a petition in favor of “free speech and the right to bear arms.” The amount was later raised to $100 per signature.
“Easy money,” Musk posted on the social media site X, which he owns, in October 2024.
One proposed class action case was brought by an anonymous plaintiff who says, while working as an hourly canvasser for America PAC, he was encouraged to refer people to sign the petition for additional pay. The plaintiff, listed as John Doe, says he’s owed more than $20,000 and is aware of others in similar situations.
Another case was brought by Lancaster man Anthony Maglietta and two other swing state voters who say they were never paid for signing the petition or referring others.
Liss-Riordan, the attorney for both cases, is trying to get them approved as a class action. They’re moving forward together in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
She says she’s heard from dozens of people who could qualify if the court allows it.
“These are generally people who are followers of Elon Musk, and believed in what he was doing and are aligned politically with a goal here,” she told the Capital-Star. “The fact that they weren’t even paid what they were told they would be paid — I don’t know if it’s surprising or not, but it’s very disappointing.”
The Capital-Star reached out to lawyers for Musk and America PAC, an email associated with Musk’s family office, and a public relations firm that employs a spokesperson for America PAC. None responded.
America PAC’s website says, “America PAC has already mailed the overwhelming majority of checks owed to eligible referrers and petition signers. If you haven’t received payment yet, that does not necessarily mean you won’t … We continue to review and process outstanding payments that have been flagged for mismatched information or require additional action.”
Musk is reported to have spent around $290 million helping Trump and Republicans get elected in 2024, making him the largest single political donor of the election cycle. Following the election, he was made a special government employee by the Trump administration, serving as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Going in circles”
In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Wendy Beetlestone, Liss-Riordan explained that her clients requested documents from the defendants in December 2025, part of the discovery process.
She said her team was told by America PAC that they did not have the documents, and should seek them from third-party vendors they’d contracted. But when they went to those vendors, they were told that America PAC had them.
“Plaintiffs are frustrated that they have been going in circles to obtain the discovery that is essential to their case – with Defendants claiming the vendors have the documents and the vendors claiming Defendants have the documents – and neither agreeing to produce them,” Liss-Riordan wrote.
Moreover, she alleges that some of the vendors may not be as independent as they seem. She says, for example, United States of America Inc. and Group America, LLC were established by Musk. And other vendors she sought documents from had principal members who were also high-ups at America PAC.
A conference has been set up between Eastern District Judge Wendy Beetlestone and lawyers for both parties on Tuesday, but it will not be streamed to the public.
Both parties have requested an extension of the deadline to certify a class action case from July 31 to November 30. It would mark the third such extension.
According to Liss-Riordan, class certification can’t be done until more documents are turned over in discovery.
Musk and America PAC are also being sued in a Texas U.S. District Court over an alleged $1 million giveaway to swing state voters who signed a petition to support the U.S. Constitution. Plaintiffs allege that Musk and America PAC misled voters into thinking winners would be chosen randomly, but were actually predetermined.
The bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission also agreed in a 5-1 vote in July to refer two complaints against Musk to the Brown County district attorney’s office, finding probable cause that he violated the state’s election bribery statute with another million dollar giveaway during the state’s 2025 state supreme court election.
AN 6 26
As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme prepare to be arraigned this week in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.
*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.
That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.
Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await arraignment on 11 felony forgery charges on June 16, Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.
Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.
Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.
Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.
The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”
Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.
“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”
‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin
The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.
The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — are scheduled to be arraigned on June 16.
Each faces 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.
The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.
Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.
Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.
Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.
“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”
Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.
Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.
“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.
“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”
*Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander atashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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4 26 STATE SCOTUS?
MAGA just blew their chance to 'hijack elections' in key swing state - Alternet.org
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am 3 26
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the Republican leader of the Wisconsin Senate is the latest in a “string of retirements” of prominent GOP lawmakers as rebalanced district maps begin to take effect.
Sen. Devin LeMahieu has held the office since 2015 and was elected majority leader in 2020. But now that the state’s new liberal-leaning supreme court has agreed to new un-gerrymandered district maps giving Republicans less of an advantage in upcoming elections, LeMahieu has suddenly determined that “… the time has come for a new chapter in my life."
“LeMahieu is the second top Republican to announce his intention to leave the GOP-controlled state Legislature,” reports MJS. “Assembly Speaker Robin Vos earlier this year announced he would retire at the end of his current term.”
In 2023, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned legislative maps drawn by GOP lawmakers, which overwhelmingly favored Republicans, by a 4-to-3 vote — but only after a ferocious and expensive election that put a new liberal judge on the court.
That ruling forced the state to submit new maps in advance of the 2024 election. Liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz, elected that same year, cast the deciding vote to eliminate the GOP-drawn maps.
Prior to its new maps, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project called Wisconsin's state legislative maps among the most unfair in the nation, with Princeton giving "F" grades to both the state assembly map and the state senate map in 2022.
Vox.com's Ian Millhiser called the Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander so aggressive that it was practically impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature.
"In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats — just three seats short of the two-thirds supermajority Republicans would need to override a gubernatorial veto," Millhiser wrote.
Now, three years later, Republicans are headed for the door as fairer maps end the likelihood of reelection in this state that voted for President Donald Trump in the last national election.
The MJS reports LeMahieu said he is looking forward to spending more time with his wife and “rooting for bold conservative reform from the sidelines."
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an 4 26
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Republican lawmakers are letting taxpayers foot $500-an-hour attorney fees to defend against a lawsuit challenging them “over that very practice” of “using taxpayer money to hire private attorneys.”
“The lawsuit, which was filed by liberal law firm Law Forward in February, followed a 2025 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation that found the state Legislature had spent about $26 million in taxpayer money on legal fees to private law firms since 2017,” reports MJS.
The paper notes that the lawyer fees really kicked in after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul won the November 2018 election, defeating Republican former Gov. Scott Walker and Attorney General Brad Schimel. The sharp increase in spending also followed a 2018 law passed by Republican legislators, authorizing legislative leaders to hire private lawyers with taxpayer money.
That 2018 law sets no limit to the amount of taxpayer money the Legislature can spend on outside counsel.
Milwaukee-based law firm Fox, O'Neill & Shannon is charging taxpayers $460 and hour to defend Republicans’ new right to hire them. Colorado firm Wheeler Trigg O'Donnell will charge the Senate “a blended rate of $550 an hour for all lawyers who work on this matter," reports MJS.
"It's pretty ironic that the taxpayer will once again be on the hook for the Legislature's inclination to spend, spend, spend on outside lawyers," Jeff Mandell, president and general counsel of Law Forward, said in an emailed statement. "Wisconsin taxpayers are on the hook for a pretty hefty bill, not just from the Assembly, but from the Senate as well."
Neither Assembly Speaker Robin Vos nor Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu responded to requests for an interview.
The Sentinel reports Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to require a vote by the full Assembly or Senate before either house could hire private counsel at taxpayer expense. That same proposal would require the vote of the full Legislature for a joint appointment.
But Republican leadership killed that bill before a floor vote.
//
[### The Journal Sentinel asked legal experts from Marquette ...
https://www.facebook.com › StevensPointJRL › posts](https://www.facebook.com/StevensPointJRL/posts/the-journal-sentinel-asked-legal-experts-from-marquette-university-law-school-an/1400868885390064/)
O'Neill, Fox O'Neill Shannon, S.C., Milwaukee Attorneys Rotker and Kaul served as counsel on the Milwaukee and Madison voting rights cases, respectively ...
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FANNI ga DEAD, AND TRUMP IS GOING AFTER RECORDS FOR bs REVIS? CONTEXT
AN 12 25
When Donald Trump won the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he was facing four criminal indictments — two of them pertaining to his efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. One was a federal case prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); the other was a Georgia case prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith cited DOJ's policy against prosecuting a sitting president. And in late November, Fulton Superior Judge Scott McAfee ruled that the Georgia case was officially "dismissed in its entirety."
But that doesn't necessarily mean that allies of Trump cannot face election interference-related charges.
In a decision on Monday, December 15, Dane County, Wisconsin Circuit Judge John Hyland ruled that there was probable cause to move forward with 11 felony charges against two Trump allies in that state: Jim Troupis (Trump's 2020 campaign attorney for Wisconsin) and Mike Roman (director of Trump's 2020 Election Day operations). Troupis and Roman are facing charges for their role in the fake elector scheme of 2020.
According to Associated Press reporter Scott Bauer, "The charges relate to attempts by the former aides to present a slate of Republican electors to Congress falsely claiming that Trump had won Wisconsin that year even though he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The Wisconsin case is moving forward even as others in the battleground states of Michigan and Georgia have faltered. A special prosecutor last year dropped a federal case claiming Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election. Another case in Nevada is still alive."
Hyland, Bauer notes, "said communication from the defendants showed their intent to present as legitimate a certificate awarding Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes to Trump, not a document to be accepted only if a court ruled that Trump won the state."
"The preliminary hearing of a third person charged, former Trump attorney Ken Chesebro, was postponed amid questions about what statements the man made to prosecutors that could be admitted in court," Bauer reports. "The judge said he wanted to hold a separate hearing on whether comments Chesebro made in an agreement with Wisconsin investigators were allowed to be admitted at trial."
*Read the full Associated Press article at this link.
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Public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers—and the push by corporations and officials to move forward with their construction anyway—were vividly illustrated in a viral video this week of a woman who was arrested after speaking out against a proposed data center in her community in Wisconsin.
Christine Le Jeune, a member of Great Lakes Neighbors United in Port Washington, spoke at a Common Council meeting in the town on Tuesday evening. The meeting was not focused on the recently approved $15 million “Lighthouse” data center set to be built a mile from downtown Port Washington—part of a project developed by Vantage Data Centers for OpenAI and Oracle—but the first 30 minutes were taken up by members of the public who spoke out against the project.
As CNBC reported last month, more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling on Port Washington officials to obtain voter approval before entering into the deal, but the Common Council and a review board went ahead with creating a Tax Incremental District for the project without public input. The data center still requires other approvals to officially move forward.
“We will not continue to be silenced and ignored while our beautiful and pristine city is taken away from us and handed over to a corporation intent on extracting as many resources as they can regardless of the impact on the people who live here,” said Le Jeune. “Most leaders would have tabled the issue after receiving public input and providing sufficient notice. But you did nothing, and you laughed about it.”
Le Jeune spoke for her allotted three minutes and went slightly over the time limit. She then chanted, “Recall, recall, recall!” at members of the Common Council as other community members applauded.
Police Chief Kevin Hingiss then approached Le Jeune while she was sitting in her seat, listening to the next speaker, and asked her to leave.
She refused, and another officer approached her before a chaotic scene broke out.
City officials had told attendees not to speak out of order during the meeting, and Le Jeune acknowledged that she and others had spoken out of turn at times.
But she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelthat she had been surprised by the police officers’ demand that she leave, and by the eventual violence of the incident, with officers physically removing her from her seat and dragging her and two other people across the floor.
The two other residents had approached Le Jeune to protest the officers’ actions.
“I never expected something like that to happen in a meeting. It was very strange,” she told the Journal Sentinel. “Suddenly this police chief showed up in front of me, and all I was thinking was: ‘Wait, what is going on? Why is he interrupting her speech? ... It felt like [police] were kind of primed tonight to pounce.”
State Sen. Chris Larson (D-7) said that “police should not be allowed to violently detain a person who is nonviolently exercising their free speech. This used to be something all Americans agreed on.”
William Walter, executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, filmed the arrest and told ABC News affiliate WISN, “I’ve never seen a response like that in my life.”
“What I did see was a lot of members of the Port Washington community who are really frustrated that they’re being ignored and they’re being dismissed by their elected officials,” he said.
AI data centers, he added, “will impact you. They’ll impact your friends, your family, your neighbors, your parents, your children. These are the kinds of things that are going to be dictating the future of Wisconsin, not just for the next couple of years but for the next decade, the next 50 years.”
After Le Jeune’s arrest, another resident, Dawn Stacey, denounced the Common Council members for allowing the aggressive arrest.
“We have so many people who have these concerns about this data center,” said Stacey. “Are we being heard by the Common Council? No we’re not. Instead of being heard we have people being dragged out of the room.”
“For democracy to thrive, we need to have respect between public servants and the people who they serve,” she added.
Vantage has distributed flyers in Port Washington, which has a population of 17,000, promising residents 330 full-time jobs after construction. But as CNBC reported, “Data centers don’t tend to create a lot of long-lasting jobs.”
Another project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin hired 3,000 construction workers and foresees 500 employees, while McKinsey said a data center it is planning would need 1,500 people for construction but only around 50 for “steady-state operations.”
Residents in Port Washington have also raised concerns about the data center’s impact on the environment, including through its water use, the potential for exploding utility prices for residents, and the overall purpose of advancing AI.
As Common Dreamsreported Thursday, the development of data centers has caused a rapid surge in consumers’ electricity bills, with costs rising more than 250% in just five years. Vantage has claimed its center will run on 70% renewable energy, but more than half of the electricity used to power data center campuses so far has come from fossil fuels, raising concerns that the expansion of the facilities will worsen the climate emergency.
A recent Morning Consult poll found that a rapidly growing number of Americans support a ban on AI data centers in their surrounding areas—41% said they would support a ban in the survey taken in late November, compared to 37% in October.
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AN SLATE 11 25
Elections have consequences, and on Tuesday, Slate reports the liberal majority Wisconsin Supreme Court took a major step in striking down the state’s Republican gerrymandered map that disenfranchises Democratic voters.
The majority appointed a pair of three-judge panels to decide whether the map violates the state constitution and if the judiciary must impose a fairer substitute,” reports Slate's Mark Joseph Stern. But their decision drew dissent from the court’s conservative members, who used to hold a majority before frustrated Wisconsin voters installed a new liberal justice in a special election earlier this year.
Conservative Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler — now in the minority — argued that the use of a more balanced map would violate the U.S. Constitution. She cited a 2022 Supreme Court decision, Moore v. Harper, for the proposition that state courts’ role in congressional redistricting is “exceedingly limited.”
“There is just one problem,” said Stern. “Moore said no such thing. That quotation appears nowhere in the ruling. To the contrary, Moore held the opposite, concluding that state courts canplay a legitimate, meaningful role in congressional redistricting.”
Wisconsin’s congressional map has long been in the crosshairs of voting rights advocates, who pushed a grassroots campaign against billionaire Elon Musk’s attempt to buy a conservative majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court special election earlier this year.
Musk landed a ‘blowout’ loss, however, and Democrats took the court majority by a 4-3 lead with the win of liberal judicial candidate Susan Crawford.
“The state’s electorate is split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Yet in 2024, it elected six Republicans and just two Democrats to the House of Representatives,” said Stern. “This 6–2 split is a product of a notorious gerrymander that Republicans drew after the 2010 census.”
Wisconsin’s new hard-fought, 4–3 liberal majority in the high court has already struck down the state’s legislativemap, which was an egregious Republican gerrymander. Now two groups of plaintiffs are targeting the equally Republican-biased congressional map.
“If their lawsuit prevails, Democrats could gain up to three seats in the House of Representatives,” said Stern.
“It is not clear how Ziegler’s misquotation wound up in the published opinion of a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. By Wednesday morning, the court had withdrawn the opinion from its website and replaced it with a partial correction — without publicly acknowledging the mistake,” said Stern. “Yet this new version doubles down on the first draft’s underlying error: It continues to assert that SCOTUS severely restricted state courts’ oversight of congressional redistricting, offering a patently inaccurate summary of Moore’s holding. To justify her hostility toward judicial redistricting, Ziegler resorted to a make-believe version of the law.”
“Mistakes happen,” Stern continued. “But when they do, judges are supposed to fix them, not recast them into a doctrine that doesn’t exist.”
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an 11 25
A Republican lawmaker’s plan to regulate drop boxes and give Wisconsin’s clerks more time to process absentee ballots ran into obstacles last week, including skepticism from fellow Republicans and a rival GOP bill to ban drop boxes entirely.
*Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.
The cool reception for Rep. Scott Krug’s ideas, especially to let clerks process ballots on the Monday before an election, underscores the GOP’s persistent internal divide over election policy in Wisconsin, with advocates of reforms long sought by election officials of both parties running into distrust fueled by conspiracy theories and misinformation. Last week, the resistance appeared strong enough to stall or complicate efforts by Republicans who aim to address clerks’ needs and craft workable policy that can gain Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ support.
That split was on full display at a Nov. 4 hearing of the Assembly Elections Committee, chaired by Rep. Dave Maxey.
Krug, a former committee chair who championed the draft bill to regulate drop boxes, argued that his colleagues should adopt a “reality-based” mindset with their approach to drop boxes. Liberals, he said, control the governor’s office, making it all but certain that GOP Rep. Lindee Brill’s bill to ban drop boxes would get vetoed by Evers.
To that, Brill responded: “I am a believer in God and a follower of Jesus Christ, so do I think there’s a chance that [Evers] would change his mind and sign this into law? Sure. But I’m taking this on because our Republican president believes this is the direction we should be heading.”
In response to questions, she dismissed an Associated Press survey of election officials that found no widespread fraud from drop boxes in the 2020 presidential election that could have affected the results, saying she wasn’t sure she considered the AP a valid source.
“You and I find truth in different spots,” she told a Democratic lawmaker.
During the hearing, Maxey let others speak at length, including Peter Bernegger — a conspiracy theorist fined by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for making frivolous complaints — who echoed unfounded claims of widespread drop box fraud in Wisconsin.
When Krug scrutinized Brill’s proposal, though, Maxey interrupted him, leading a visibly frustrated Krug to ask him to “give me the last sentence, like we’ve let others have.”
Republicans have slim majority, divided caucus
This clash between the two views on election policy “is longstanding and is not going to be resolved anytime soon,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and founder of the Elections Research Center. “Right now, it seems like neither path is really working.”
Assembly Republican leaders typically only advance bills that have 50 GOP votes, enough to pass without Democratic support. They once held 64 of 99 seats, nearly a supermajority, but now have just 54, meaning they can afford to lose only four GOP votes to advance legislation. That math, and the internal distrust, make passing even modest reforms difficult. Unless they can rally the more skeptical voices in their caucus, Burden said, Republicans have to be willing to cross the aisle and court Democratic votes.
Maxey, who co-authored Brill’s bill, told Votebeat that drop boxes “are about as effective for election integrity as a mask is at preventing COVID,” an analogy that left his meaning muddled: Drop boxes in Wisconsin have never been proven to be a means for widespread fraud, whereas masks have been shown to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Maxey said his worries weren’t “wild conspiracy theories” but came from past ballot issues in Madison, though none of those involved drop boxes. He told Votebeat that he fears tampering and that voters using drop boxes might be unable to fix ballot errors.
Burden noted that valid ballots deposited in drop boxes are like any other absentee ballot, and contain voters’ and witnesses’ information, which helps prevent fraud.
Monday processing proposal in doubt
Krug’s draft proposal to let local clerks begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before an election was a change long sought by election officials to help speed up the reporting of results, but blocked by a few conservative lawmakers. Krug and other GOP leaders hoped his proposal could win them over because it was part of a broader package that included measures conservatives want, including an explicit ban on clerks fixing, or curing, errors on absentee ballot envelopes, and the stricter regulation of drop boxes.
But at a hearing on Nov. 6, Krug conceded that both the preprocessing and drop box proposals were in jeopardy because of GOP opposition. Those measures were stripped out of the package after pushback from Brill, Maxey, and other conservatives, who released their own bill to ban drop boxes entirely.
Maxey told Votebeat that he would likely give a Monday processing proposal a hearing in his committee but would vote against it — adding that he knows other Assembly Republicans are against it, too.
Krug — who previously told Votebeat that he “would use every little ounce of political capital effort created on elections to get Monday processing done” — appeared to downplay the measure’s importance, saying it was only an issue in Milwaukee, where late-night reporting of election results often leads to conspiracy theories about fraudulent ballot dumps.
Clerks elsewhere disagree that the problem is so localized. Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, told Votebeat she hopes Krug “hasn’t entirely given up” on the Monday processing proposal, though “that’s what it sounds like for this session, at least.”
Krug also blamed its failure so far on the governor’s office, which he said received the draft Monday processing proposal months ago but never got back to him.
“Scott Krug has taken enough you-know-what in every community in the state of Wisconsin for being bold on this issue and saying we have to do it,” Krug said. “I need partners.”
*Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander atashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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JUL 2025
Insurrectionist and voter suppression advocate Cleta Mitchell formed a new dark money group in 2023 to channel funds to organizations that promote the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and spread misinformation about the threat of widespread noncitizen voting.
Housed in the offices of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund) brought in $3.9 million between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and disclosed $2.1 million in expenses, more than three-quarters of which was disbursed in grants to other organizations.
The FAIR Elections Fund has no website as of publication. A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of the group’s first tax filing, recently made public, offers the first internal look into Mitchell’s group since she disclosed leading it in biographies and news reports.
The group’s IRS filing says that it made no payments for salaries or other compensation, while claiming Mitchell is working 50 hours per week for the group. This raises the question of who is paying Mitchell for her work.
Mitchell has worked to manufacture a crisis around noncitizens voting and partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push for model bills and amendments to state constitutions banning it — despite the fact that evidence of noncitizen voting is scarce. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported in 2024.
A senior legal fellow at CPI, Mitchell launched her previous project, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), with the help of the right-wing group, which was founded and led by former U.S. senator and congressman Jim DeMint and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (also an insurrectionist). In 2023, EIN moved out of the CPI constellation of nonprofits and is now “administered and managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy with Virginia Institute president Lynn Taylor also serving as EIN’s Chairman as Cleta Mitchell retains an active EIN role as its founder,” according to a 2023 booklet obtained by CMD.
EIN’s latest IRS filing shows that as of December 2023 it was still registered at CPI’s office address, with just $213 left in the bank.
Serving on the FAIR Elections Fund board of directors alongside Mitchell, its president, are Vice President Heather Honey, Vice President Daniel Bean, Secretary Don Workman, and Treasurer Pat Corrigan.
Honey, also an executive director at the Election Research Institute, is a close ally of Mitchell who worked with her to sow doubt about the efficacy and trustworthiness of the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which has resulted in many states opting out of this interstate effort to help ensure accurate voter rolls.
A 2024 analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that conclusions in Honey’s report on ERIC “are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and… are frequently not backed by the data she presents.”
The IRS filing shows that the FAIR Elections Fund paid $121,284 to Honey’s organization Verity Vote LLC for “consulting.”
Vice President Daniel Bean is an attorney who represented Trump advisor Andy Surabian when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Secretary Don Workman is a partner at Baker & Hostetler and was a partner at Foley & Lardner, the Washington-based law firm that Mitchell was forced to resign from after she participated in the infamous post-2020 election phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to claim victory in that swing state.
Treasurer Pat Corrigan runs Compass Direct LLC, a fundraising company that works for CPI, where his brother Edward is president. Given Corrigan’s role as treasurer, he is likely the one tasked with raising funds for the organization.
$1.6 Million in Grants
The FAIR Elections Fund distributed $1.6 million in grants in 2023-24 to 10 allied groups.
The FDRLST Media Foundation, which publishes the right-wing web magazine The Federalist, received $400,000, the largest grant. In 2020, The Federalist falsely accused Democrats of trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania during extended vote counting in the days following the presidential election.
The pro-Trump outlet also published a column EIN’s Kerri Toloczko misinforming readers that noncitizen voting is a crisis that needs to be addressed through federal legislation. Since 2019 it has run nine pieces by Mitchell on noncitizen voting, purging voter rolls, and voting by mail.
EIN’s administrator, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, received the next largest grant of $325,000. The Institute held its fifth Election Integrity Summit on May 16, and holds “infrastructure trainings” twice a month.
The FAIR Elections Fund funneled its third largest grant of $300,000 to the State Freedom Caucus Foundation, the sister organization of the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN). CPI incubated SFCN, which Meadows launched in 2021. From the beginning, the group has touted “election integrity” as a priority.
The network has been deployed to ban noncitizens from voting at the federal level as well as at the state level in places like Missouri.
Mitchell also spoke at the 2024 State Freedom Caucus Network Summit, where Wyoming State Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R) said she “shared some shocking statistics about American elections and illegal immigration.”
The Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) received $150,000 from the FAIR Elections Fund, the IRS filing shows. IAP President Chris Chmielenski collaborated with Mitchell and Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, to work a room of 150 attendees at ALEC’s 2024 Annual Meeting to approve an Only Citizens Vote Coalition model bill banning noncitizen voting, The Guardian reported.
The FAIR Elections Fund, Immigration Accountability Project, and Election Transparency Initiative are all members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, with Mitchell serving as a “co-convener.”
Also receiving FAIR Elections Fund grants between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 were the Tea Party Patriots Foundation ($100,000); Citizen Outreach Foundation ($89,100); John K MacIver Institute for Public Policy ($75,000); Strong Communities Foundation of AZ ($75,000); Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty ($75,000); and Wisconsin Voter Alliance Corp ($25,000).
In November, Wisconsin voters passed a ballot measure to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state, or federal election. The right-wing MacIver Institute and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty were proponents of its passage.
Funding is Dark
Despite the new IRS filings, funding information about the FAIR Elections Fund is scarce. The organization is not required to disclose its donors, and a CMD search of the filings only identified a single contribution of $795,000 from CPI, which does not note the original source of the funds. A CMD analysis of CPI’s known funders is available here.
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AN 9 26SN
A formal recommendation of punishment for Michael Gableman, whose career rise and fall set him apart in Wisconsin legal and political history, signals the end of a case that has been humiliating for the former state Supreme Court justice and the court itself.
In a report issued Friday, a referee in a state Office of Lawyer Regulation case against Gableman found that Gableman committed 10 lawyer misconduct violations in his probe of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin.
The partisan probe was authorized at the behest of then-citizen Donald Trump, who lost that election to Joe Biden.
The referee, Milwaukee attorney James Winiarski, recommended that the state Supreme Court suspend Gableman’s law license for three years.
Gableman and the Office of Lawyer Regulation, seeking to settle the case, had stipulated to the three-year suspension.
“A high level of discipline is needed to protect the public, the courts and the legal system from repetition” of Gableman’s conduct, by him or other attorneys, the referee wrote.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who was appointed to the court by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, said before the report was issued that Gableman’s behavior in the investigation “was so outrageous and damaging to the image of the Supreme Court.
“But he has been on the outskirts or around ethical violations his whole Supreme Court career.”
Gableman worked for first Trump administration
Gableman, 58, a Waukesha County resident who has largely receded from public view, could not be immediately reached for comment.
The conservative Gableman, a former small-county judge with close ties to the Republican Party, made history by defeating an incumbent justice in the 2008 election. He served one 10-year term before his career began to unravel.
As Wisconsin Watch detailed in April, Gableman attended the 2016 Republican National Convention, in possible violation of the state judicial code, and had to be escorted out of two gatherings there after causing disturbances. After deciding not to seek reelection in 2018, he worked for the first Trump administration before leading the election investigation, a probe that found no fraud but cost taxpayers $2.8 million — four times the budgeted amount.
Gableman now finds himself facing punishment from the very court he served on.
Winiarski has practiced law for more than 40 years and has previously served as referee in lawyer discipline cases. He invoiced the Supreme Court $8,208 for nearly 109 hours on the case at $75.51 per hour. He recommended Gableman be responsible for all costs associated with the disciplinary matter.
The suspension recommendation essentially codifies a stipulation Gableman made in April with the Office of Lawyer Regulation in which he stated he could not successfully mount a legal defense against the misconduct allegations.
The liberal-majority Supreme Court, which began its current session in September, must still approve the punishment.
Geske, who was a justice from 1993 to 1998, said the suspension would be fair punishment in part because Gableman’s conduct in the investigation, including threatening to jail elected officials, helped solidify the public perception that Wisconsin judges have become partisan actors.
“I think people wonder what’s happening in the court and what’s happening with the individual justices,” she said. “So I think he did great harm to the court in engaging in that behavior.”
The Office of Lawyer Regulation case against Gableman alleged that during the election investigation, Gableman violated 10 counts of Supreme Court rules of professional conduct for attorneys. He was accused of making false statements about a judge, an opposing attorney, and two mayors; making false statements to the Office of Lawyer Regulation; disobeying a court order; and violating the state open-records law and confidentiality rules.
A call for tougher penalties for misconduct
University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber, who is affiliated with UW’s law school, said a three-year license suspension verges on lenient because of the seriousness of the misconduct and because Gableman was acting in a public capacity, not as a private attorney.
Wausau attorney Dean Dietrich, a former Wisconsin Bar Association president and expert on lawyers’ professional responsibility, said “it is unfortunate” that a former justice is facing a law license suspension, but that “the actions of one person do not reflect the actions of others.”
Judicial offices in Wisconsin technically are nonpartisan, but state Supreme Court races have drawn heavy participation and money from the Republican and Democratic parties.
Marquette University law professor Chad Oldfather, author of a recent book on the importance of selecting judges with good character, said a three-year suspension would be typical for the type of misconduct alleged against Gableman.
“Ultimately, we want people of the highest character in judicial roles,” Oldfather said. “Somehow we have to find a way to get the legal profession and the broader culture to buy into that as the top priority, which seems like an awfully heavy lift these days.”
There are also calls for tougher action on lawyer misconduct.
Madison lawyer Jeffrey Mandell, head of a law firm that filed a misconduct complaint against Gableman with the Office of Lawyer Regulation, noted that Gableman previously was investigated for ethics violations involving an ad he ran in his Supreme Court campaign and for hearing cases while a justice that involved a law firm that gave him free legal services.
Gableman was not sanctioned in those cases.
Mandell said the state needs to act more quickly and more decisively on lawyer misconduct. He noted Wisconsin lawyers are not subject to permanent disbarment. Those who receive the most severe punishment, a five-year license revocation, can petition after five years to get their license back.
The vast majority of states allow disbarred attorneys to apply for license reinstatement.
“Some conduct is simply beyond the pale, deserving of a permanent ban from the public trust of legal practice,” Mandell said. “It’s past time for Wisconsin to recognize this.”
*Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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AN 4 25
Smart, progressive women pose a serious threat to MAGA supremacy. Just ask Elon Musk, who wasted millions of dollars in Wisconsin trying to win a seat on the state Supreme Court for MAGA candidate Brad Schimel, only to watch Susan Crawford clean Schimel’s clock.
From his first presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016, “Lock her up!” has been Donald Trump’s battle cry. Restoring the greatness of a white, male-dominated America apparently requires menacing displays of dominance over women in positions of authority. Who can forget Trump acting like a stalker, invading Clinton’s personal space and looming behind her during a 2016 debate?
On Friday, a few weeks after MAGA lost its bid to disempower the progressive female majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Trump administration sent federal agents to arrest Hannah Dugan at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Trump’s attorney general and the man he chose to lead the FBI gleefully posted pictures of Dugan’s “perp walk” in handcuffs, crowing about this unprecedented assault on the dignity and authority of a judge and the sovereignty of local courts.
On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Dugan. “In order to uphold the public’s confidence in the courts of this state during the pendency of the criminal proceeding against Judge Dugan, we conclude, on our own motion, that it is in the public interest that she be temporarily relieved of her official duties,” the state’s highest court said in a two-page letter ordering Judge Dugan “temporarily prohibited from exercising the powers of a circuit court judge.”
It’s a perplexing decision. It didn’t arise from any complaint; the Court acted on its own. And Dugan had already been relieved of her duties while she focuses on her defense by the chief judge in Milwaukee, who assigned her calendar to other judges to cover.
Worse, the suspension gives the impression that the federal charges against Dugan are indeed serious. But that impression is not supported by the only evidence the government has produced.
The justification for Dugan’s arrest, laid out in a federal criminal complaint, is that she impeded federal law enforcement agents when she objected to ICE disrupting her court’s proceedings and ushered the man they came to arrest out a side door. The defendant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was appearing before Dugan on a misdemeanor battery charge unrelated to his immigration status, exited into the public hallway where the agents were waiting for him. Then they followed him outside and made their arrest — unimpeded.
Fox News claimed Dugan concealed Flores-Ruiz in a jury room. But that assertion is contradicted by the sworn testimony in the government’s own criminal complaint.
The complaint features breathlessly sexist descriptions of Dugan appearing “visibly angry” and “walking quickly,” as if that were evidence of wrongdoing. But any actual wrongdoing is hard to pinpoint.
“Whatever you think of the actual conduct the complaint alleges,” says Dean Strang, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a long-time Wisconsin criminal defense lawyer, “there is a real question about whether there’s even arguably any federal crime here.”
The government’s behavior, meanwhile, is “extraordinarily atypical,” for a nonviolent, nondrug charge involving someone who is not a flight risk, says Strang.
The handcuffs, the public arrest at Dugan’s workplace, the media circus — none of it was normal, or justified. Then Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel began posting pictures of Dugan in handcuffs on social media to brag about it.
“So what is it they are trying to do?” asks Strang. His conclusion: “Humiliate and terrify, not just her but every other judge in the country.”
The bigger issue here, beyond an unprecedented, public display of dominance and intimidation by the Trump administration, is that, in turning federal law enforcement into an arm of his personal, vengeance-themed reality show, Trump is running roughshod over the constitutional principle of federalism, which respects the sovereignty of the states, the integrity of the courts and public safety. Scaring defendants, witnesses and victims away from making court appearances makes it harder to administer justice and makes all of us less safe.
But you’d never know that to listen to Republican state officials, who are championing federal agents barging into courts, schools and churches, forgetting everything they ever said about local control and states’ rights. In a letter released Tuesday, Assembly Republicans led by Speaker Robin Vos sent a letter to Gov. Tony Evers, declaring “our caucus believes it is imperative that our laws reflect the need for local law enforcement to comply with these efforts.”
Republicans accuse Evers of issuing guidance to state officials that impedes federal ICE raids.
“Unfortunately, recent events in Milwaukee have underscored the importance for our state to legislate and enforce compliance with federal immigration law,” their letter declares, citing Dugan’s arrest.
The Republicans demand that Evers rescind guidance telling state agencies that they need not answer questions, hand over files, or allow ICE to enter non-public areas without a warrant.
Capitulating to an administration that has admitted to deporting U.S. citizens and defied court orders to effect the return of a man it admits was mistakenly sent to a Salvadoran prison is a terrible idea. Big law firms that agreed to drop clients and offer free legal work to appease the Trump administration have eroded trust in the law. Authoritarian undermining of our legal system is a grave danger.
The least the most timid among us can do is insist that the federal government follow the law before caving in. That’s what Dugan did, when she asked if the agents who came to her courtroom to arrest Flores-Ruiz had a judicial warrant. They did not. Nor do they have proof that Dugan herself broke any laws.
The last thing we need right now is more capitulation to MAGA bullying. Stand strong.
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Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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an 3 25
:{Fresh from spending nearly $300 million to influence the 2024 elections, the richest person in the world has set his sights squarely on Wisconsin. Elon Musk is apparently not content with taking a chainsaw to the lives of thousands of hard-working federal employees engaged in providing health care to rural American children and veterans, with slashing Medicaid for millions of our most vulnerable citizens, with cutting projects seeking desperately needed cures for cancer, Ebola and other deadly diseases and with eviscerating foreign assistance that thousands of people all over the world rely on for survival.
Musk is now also carpet bombing Wisconsin with millions of dollars for negative ads and cash infusions to influence the outcome of the upcoming April 1 election to fill an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.}:
After 30 years of distinguished service, the Court’s most senior justice, Ann Walsh Bradley announced her retirement last year. Now, with the fast-approaching election to determine her successor in just a matter of days, voters will decide the ideological composition of the majority on the court and therefore the future direction of Wisconsin and quite possibly the nation.
In January, when Musk announced he was invading our state, he falsely proclaimed on Twitter: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud.” He’s wrong on all counts. In the first place, candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court don’t run for election with party labels. Our judicial elections are nonpartisan – at least they are supposed to be. Secondly, voting fraud does not occur in our state because we have long had strong safeguards in place to prevent it. Voting fraud is a complete and total non-issue in Wisconsin and a distraction from real and serious attacks on democracy such as ongoing voter suppression proposals and laws that already make it more difficult to vote here than previously.
But the unelected Musk, whose craving for national attention and power rivals that of his partner Donald Trump, has a direct financial interest in a matter that could end up before the state’s high court. Wisconsin is one of nearly half the states in the nation that prohibit auto manufacturers from being able to directly sell their vehicles to the public because it would provide those manufacturers with a competitive advantage over independent dealers. Musk’s car company, Tesla, has sought and been refused an exemption to the law by state courts, most recently in December. A sympathetic Wisconsin Supreme Court influenced by Musk’s heavy spending in the current election – already well over $12 million and rising — is in his crosshairs as well as enhanced overall political influence and power beyond our state.
In a campaign that is already the most expensive judicial election anywhere in the nation in U.S. history, Musk may end up as the single largest campaign spender through his “Building America’s Future” Super PAC and other avenues to influence the outcome in Wisconsin with his limitless out-of-state millions. How much will he spend? No one knows. But it is very important that Wisconsinites know that Musk has quickly emerged as the single most dominant source of campaign cash and political influence in this election and in our state.
It will be up to Wisconsinites to decide if they approve or not of this unelected richest person in the world buying control of our highest court while at the same time continuing his unprecedented destruction of so many vital national services and safeguards Wisconsinites depend on.
The voters of Wisconsin can prevail over Musk and his millions by turning out in force – by returning their absentee ballots in time to be counted, or by showing up and voting early in person or at their polling place on the first day of April – Election Day. At the ballot box, each of us still has more voice and control over our destiny than even the richest person in the world who can’t vote here and who knows and cares little or nothing about Wisconsin other than as a place for him to sell more Teslas and ruin more lives.
On the evening of March 6 Musk’s multimillion dollar Space X Starship exploded in the skies over the coast of Florida shortly after it was launched. Thank goodness no lives were lost but it was nonetheless a spectacular failure. The April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election could be another spectacular failure for Musk and his gargantuan bankroll. It is entirely in the hands of Wisconsin voters to decide.
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Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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AN 2 25
A political action group tied to Elon Musk that has sought to influence Wisconsin’s high stakes Supreme Court election canceled a social media ad this week after it featured the wrong person.
The ad by the group Building America’s Future attempted to attack Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the race. However the ad featured a photo of a different Susan Crawford. Instead of showing the judge, the ad, which attacked Crawford’s record on crime, featured former Harvard Law School Professor Susan P. Crawford.
Derrick Honeyman, a spokesperson for Crawford’s campaign, said in a statement the ad was a “fraud.”
“Maybe an audit is needed of the staff at Musk’s shady far-right group,” Honeyman said. “Wisconsinites shouldn’t trust a single thing from these guys.”
First reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the ad ran for four days and cost $3,000.
Building America’s Future has promised to spend more than $1.5 million on airing anti-Crawford ads in a number of television markets across the state. Another Musk-associated PAC has invested $1 million in canvassing and field operations in support of the conservative candidate, Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel.
Musk’s support of Schimel comes as Tesla has sued the state of Wisconsin over a law that prevents car manufacturers from owning dealerships in the state.
The Supreme Court race will determine the ideological swing of the body. The race between Crawford and Schimel could break spending records for a Wisconsin judicial campaign after 2023’s race set the previous record at about $50 million.
Both candidates have been supported by contributions from billionaires. Crawford has received help from George Soros and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while Schimel received donations from Illinois billionaire Liz Uihlein, Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks and outside help from Musk.
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Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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AN 2 25
'A lot of fear': Republicans a no show as Wisconsin farmers complain of Trump chaos
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an 2 25
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 qualmsabout 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.
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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2 25
Republican state lawmakers said Tuesday they would introduce a bill to force local law enforcement to verify the citizenship status of people in custody for a felony offense and to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if citizenship cannot be verified. Counties that do not comply would be at risk of losing state money.
Lawmakers said that Wisconsin needs to assist President Donald Trump and the federal government with its work deporting “illegal immigrants” from the United States. Since inauguration day, federal agents have arrested more than 8,000 people, including some people who had no criminal history.
State Sen. Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin) said at a press conference that the legislation is meant to “keep communities safe” and that the message to sheriffs is “do not put your personal politics above the safety of the citizens who elected you.”
Under the bill, noncompliance by a sheriff would result in a 15% reduction in the county’s shared revenue payments from the state in the next year. Counties across Wisconsin rely on those payments to fund public safety, emergency medical services, transportation and other services. Sheriffs would have to certify compliance each year with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
The bill would also require sheriffs to comply with detainers and administrative warrants received from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for individuals held in the county jail for a criminal offense. Sheriffs would also need to seek reimbursement from the federal government for any costs incurred while holding people.
“We don’t want Wisconsin on the hook for this,” Bradley said.
The only thing this proposal accomplishes is to bankrupt Wisconsin law enforcement both morally and fiscally.
– Milwaukee County Supervisors
The bill would also require sheriffs to keep a record of people who were verified as unlawfully residing in the U.S. and submit the information to the Legislature in a biannual report.
Lawmakers said that sheriffs would continue to have discretion over whether to report people who aren’t detained for a felony offense.
Bradley said that only “far left extremists in this country believe that someone here illegally that commits a felony should be allowed to stay.” He noted that the Laken Riley Act, which expands the mandatory detention requirements of immigrants charged and arrested on petty and other crimes, passed Congress with the help of 46 House and 12 Senate Democrats. He said the issue should be one with bipartisan support and called on his Democratic colleagues to sign on.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported the legislation after obtaining a copy of the draft bill.
Similar legislation was enacted in North Carolina last year.
Democratic opposition
Gov. Tony Evers has already committed to vetoing the legislation should it make it to his desk.
In a statement released to the Journal Sentinel, Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback called the bill an “unserious proposal” that is “trying to micromanage local law enforcement decisions by threatening to gut state aid by 15% for our local communities — that’s a non-starter.”
“We shouldn’t be threatening law enforcement with deep budget cuts, we should be working together with local law enforcement to improve public safety, reduce crime, and keep dangerous drugs and violent criminals off of our streets,” Cudaback said.
Assembly Majority Leaders Tyler August (R-Walworth) said it’s “unbelievable” Evers would threaten a veto of the legislation.
“It’s unbelievably unfortunate, but not unexpected that the governor would threaten to veto a bill that he hasn’t even seen yet,” August said. “[It] seems to be his M.O. that he governs by veto.”
Currently, seven Wisconsin counties have agreements with ICE to hold in jail immigrants without legal status to reside in the U.S. At one point, that number was eight, but Lafayette County ended its participation in ICE’s 287(g) program.
August said lawmakers talked with county officials, including those in Waukesha, while drafting the bill.
“A lot of the sheriffs already do this by practice because they know that it’s what’s right for their communities,” August said.
Dane, Milwaukee counties considered noncooperative
In a cosponsorship memo, lawmakers point to a June 2024 ICE report that lists Dane and Milwaukee counties as “noncooperative institutions.”
Dane County until recently participated in the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), in which it provided the names of immigrants lacking legal status to the federal government and in return were reimbursed for the costs of their incarceration.
Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett recently ended the county’s participation in the program. He told Channel 3000 that it’s a “different time” and that the “the previous administration is completely different than our current administration, and we have to be able to continue to represent the values of our community.”
Milwaukee County Supervisors Caroline Gómez-Tom, Juan Miguel Martínez, Anne O’Connor, Steven Shea, Sky Z. Capriolo and Justin Bielinski denounced the legislation in a statement, calling it a “dangerous” proposal that would make sheriffs “a tool of the Trump administration’s bigoted obsession with scapegoating immigrants.”
The supervisors said that mandating that sheriffs honor ‘administrative warrants’ not approved by a judge would “bog down law enforcement with false alarms — preventing them from focusing on real public safety concerns like reckless driving, drug overdoses, and rising crime.”
They also warned that the bill could force Wisconsin residents to carry documents at all times to prove they have “the right to live in their homes, go to work and pick their children up from school,” and that “anyone detained by a Wisconsin sheriff who cannot immediately prove their legal status would be at risk of being handed over to federal authorities.”
A 2024 survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland in conjunction with the Brennan Center for Justice found that more than 9% of American citizens of voting age don’t have documents — including a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers — to serve as proof of citizenship readily available. The survey found that the lack of documentation could be for various reasons including documents being in the home of another family member or in a safety deposit box or that the documents have been lost, destroyed or stolen.
“The only thing this proposal accomplishes is to bankrupt Wisconsin law enforcement both morally and fiscally,” the supervisors said, adding that they encourage the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s office to “remain focused on actual public safety instead of enabling the worst policies of Trump extremists.”
ACLU of Wisconsin condemned the legislation, saying it “sends the wrong message.” The group noted that it could mean that any one who invokes their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent would have to be reported to ICE along with anyone who cooperates but fails to have access to the specific documents listed in the bill.
“It sends the message that local law enforcement should take on the additional tasks and risks of immigration status investigations,” Executive Director Melinda Brennan said in a statement. “It will encourage xenophobic sheriffs to investigate the status of not just persons accused of serious crimes but of anyone who enters their custody.”
Republican lawmakers accused Democrats of being extremist. Democratic lawmakers announced a proposal last week that would block state and local government officials from cooperating with federal deportation efforts without a judicial warrant. It would apply to detentions in a public building or facility, school, place of worship, place where child care services are provided, or place where medical or other health care services are provided.
August said Democrats’ proposal “basically would turn the entire state into a sanctuary state.”
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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2024 RACE
Eric Hovde.
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AN 12 24
Two of President-elect Donald Trump's former attorneys and one of his former aides have been criminally charged in Wisconsin as part of the "fake electors" plot from 2020.
According to the Guardian, attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis, along with Republican operative Michael Roman, have all been charged by Wisconsin's Justice Department with conspiracy to commit a crime and several additional counts of fraud. While Wisconsin has previously pursued civil action as part of the fake electors scheme, this marks the first time the Badger State has filed criminal charges in response to the plot to overturn the 2020 election in the critical battleground state.
The criminal complaint mentioned Chesebro as the brains of the operation, having authored a memo entitled: "The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes." That memo laid out the plan for Republicans to falsely submit their names to seven different swing states as the duly appointed presidential electors, even though President Joe Biden actually won the election in those states.
READ MORE: Trump, Giuliano and Meadows revealed as 'unindicted co-conspirators' in MI investigation
Chesebro's new charges are particularly noteworthy, as CNN reported in 2023 that Chesebro was cooperating with the fake elector investigations in both Michigan and Wisconsin. He also cooperated with law enforcement in both Arizona and Nevada, and pleaded guilty after Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis indicted him and more than a dozen others in her RICO case. His plea of conspiracy to commit to filing false documents guaranteed no prison time provided he cooperated with Willis' office and testified against his co-defendants.
Andrew Hitt, who was the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party in 2020, told 60 Minutes earlier this year that he felt pressured to go along with the fake elector plot out of fear of Trump's supporters. And in a 2022 deposition, Hitt said he regularly got threatening calls and emails from both sides of the political aisle, with some demanding to know his exact location.
"If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death," Hitt told journalist Anderson Cooper. "It was not a safe time."
Attorney Scott Grubmann, who represents Chesebro, insistes that his client "never believed" that Trump won the 2020 election despite his role in hatching the fake elector plot.
READ MORE:[Former Trump lawyer and Ga co-defendant now cooperating in 2 new 'fake elector' investigations
Click here to read the Guardian's report in fulL.
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The 2024 presidential election was particularly bleak for Democrats, as Republicans swept every battleground state in the Electoral College and even won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. But at the state level, Democratic candidates notched several big wins that will allow the party to have a few extra arrows in its quiver over the next few years.
The Guardian reported that in multiple state legislatures — including statehouses in several key swing states — Democrats are now well-positioned to use their new gains to frustrate President-elect Donald Trump's agenda in their own backyards. In addition to keeping three governorships in Democratic hands, the party also managed to flip numerous Republican seats in both chambers of several state capitols.
Some of the bigger marquee wins include keeping their one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, despite Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) losing at the federal level. In North Carolina, Democrats elected Attorney General Josh Stein to become the next governor. Stein dispatched Republican nominee Mark Robinson by a whopping 14-point margin despite Harris losing the Tar Heel State by more than 173,000 votes. North Carolina Democrats also managed to finally wipe out Republicans' legislative supermajority, meaning Stein's future vetoes can't be overridden.
READ MORE:[Mark Robinson on track for 'largest defeat in more than 40 years' of any NC gov candidate
Daniel Squadron, who is the co-founder of the States Project, told the Guardian that Democratic state legislative candidates outperforming Harris was likely due to both their reliance on face-to-face campaigning, and on the high quality field of state house and senate candidates across the country.
"That is the only way it was possible to hold the Pennsylvania house when the statewide results were so disappointing," Squadron said. "It’s the reason the North Carolina house supermajority was broken."
One of the most significant victories for Democrats on election night was in Wisconsin, where Democrats flipped 10 seats in the state assembly and four seats in the state senate. This win notably came a year after the Wisconsin Supreme Court — which has a 4-3 liberal majority — struck down Republicans' heavily gerrymandered state legislative maps in favor of fairer ones.
According to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Wisconsin's prior legislative districts were among the most unfair in the United States, with Princeton giving "F" grades to both the state assembly map and the state senate map in 2022. Vox writer Ian Millhiser referred to the Badger State's old maps "America's worst gerrymander" in 2023. Democrats are poised to make additional gains in the Wisconsin legislature in the 2026 elections, when the governor's mansion will also be on the line.
READ MORE:**'America's worst gerrymander' official overturned by Wisconsin Supreme Court**
Andrew Whitley, who is the executive director of the Wisconsin senate Democratic caucus, attributed his party's gains to candidates' deep knowledge of local issues in their own respective districts. He also pointed out that candidates were able to use hot-button national issues like abortion bans to convince voters to send them to the capitol.
“It’s very rare when you have bottom-of-the-ticket state legislators over-perform Kamala and Senator [Tammy] Baldwin,” Whitley said. “They worked their a—es off.”
“It’s going to be truly historic,” he added. “Gone are the days where a manufactured majority can override vetoes and pass super-regressive policies. We’re actually going to have some balance, and we’re on the cusp of not only having a balanced legislature, but a trifecta.”
Click here to read the Guardian's full article.
READ MORE:[Ex-North Carolina GOP gov admits Republicans knew Mark Robinson was a 'ticking time bomb'
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11 24 an dr earl b
...Don’t breathe the noxious gas that there is a Republican mandate right now. Battleground States flipped. It happens. Here in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris actually got more votes than Joe Biden did on 2020. We worked our asses off up here and simply got beat in large part by the massive rightwing propaganda machine that I warned about above. Wisconsin is 90 percent white and under conventional wisdom should be a bright-red state. It’s not, because we have leaders and ideas that resonate with everybody. In fact … the best thing we can hope for is that Republicans read this election as a mandate, because as you know most of their odious plans will sting their voters at least as much as everybody else. Let them get out over their skies as far as possible, and then watch them crash.
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