Erik Gunn, Wisconsin Examiner

Retired professor Larry White says the email message he got on July 4 from the Social Security Administration was unlike any he’s ever seen from the agency.

“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the email message began — using the official name of the massive legislation signed by President Donald Trump that cuts taxes and also slashes spending on Medicaid and SNAP, along with making numerous other policy changes.

White, 71, who lives in Middleton, Wisconsin, has been getting Social Security Administration email since he retired from the Beloit College psychology faculty in 2019. But until the July 4 message, he said, every single one has been straightforward, factual — and nonpolitical.

The message included a misleading description of one provision in the new law. The Social Security Administration later published a correction.

That alone angered White. But that the message was sent at all was just as irritating, he told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The email, including a quote from Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, “appeared to value currying favor with the president over telling Americans the truth,” White said. “I want our federal agencies to be independent, nonpartisan offices that act with integrity and serve the public, not the president.”

The Social Security message claims that the legislation “ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits…”

“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano stated.

As was soon widely reported, however, the message itself was off the mark.

“I was surprised to see SSA send this out as an email to such a large list since this seems more about politics than anything specific to the program,” said J. Michael Collins, a household economics expert at the University of Wisconsin. Collins directed a Social Security research center at the UW until the Trump administration shut it down earlier this year.

The actual change that the message refers to is to income taxes paid by all people 65 or older with incomes $75,000 a year or less for single filers and $150,000 a year or less for couples — regardless of whether they’re collecting Social Security or not, Collins explained.

While the message appears to single out Social Security income, “there is no new exemption of SSA income from federal income taxes, just a new deduction for all people 65+ regardless of income source,” Collins told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

For people who are 64 or younger and who get income from Social Security, there’s no comparable tax cut, he added.

To be sure, the reduction does give some help to taxpayers 65 or older who collect Social Security.

A 2022 IRS tax tip explains that half of Social Security income is taxable for a single person whose income is $25,000 to $34,000 and for a married couple filing jointly whose income is $32,000 to $44,000.

For a single person with income over $34,000 or a married couple with income over $44,000, 85% of their Social Security income is taxable.

Social Security beneficiaries with incomes below the $75,000 or $150,000 ceiling will get relief from those tax bills — along with everyone else 65 or older whose income also falls below those limits.

The tax break also lasts just a few years, ending in 2028 — stretching the claim that qualifying beneficiaries “will no longer” pay income taxes.

The email message produced a sharp blowback.

“I was appalled — it was really unprecedented,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “They’ve taken an agency that’s supposed to be above politics and made it an arm of propaganda.”

Altman recalled that when Social Security checks were mailed in October 1972, President Richard Nixon suggested including an insert in which he could take credit for a benefit increase — even though he had initially opposed it. The commissioner at the time, Robert Ball, threatened to resign if Nixon followed through, and Nixon backed off, Altman said.

As originally worded, the email message appeared to suggest two separate tax cut provisions — one for Social Security recipients 65 and older and one for others:

“The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.”

On July 7, the Social Security Administration added a correction and changed the second sentence in that paragraph to, “It does so by providing an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older…”

The correction was previously reported by HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney.

The morning that he received the Social Security message, White, the retired Beloit professor, wrote back to Bisignano directly — guessing at a direct email address for the Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner.

“Commissioner Bisignano, When did the Social Security Administration become so blatantly political? I thought government agencies like the USPS were supposed to just go about their business from one administration to the next, but clearly that’s not the case with the SSA. You have become an unabashed mouthpiece for Trump. Shame on you!”

“I was upset that the head of a major federal agency would act in a way that undermines the public’s trust,” White told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“For years, Trump has expressed contempt for America’s once-revered institutions — courts, universities, the press, medical experts, climate scientists, long-time allies abroad … the list is a long one,” White added. “Trump wants to diminish any group or individual who questions his aims or methods.”

The email message appears to play directly to that characteristic of the president, he said, and White fears that will diminish the agency in the public eye.

“What upsets me is that the commissioner of the SSA foolishly wrote a letter that will prompt millions of Americans to question the integrity of the SSA,” White said. “It takes years for an organization to build up a good reputation, but it can be fatally damaged almost overnight.”

The father of the teenager who shot and killed two people at a Madison private school and took her own life five months ago was arrested Thursday and charged with three felony counts in connection with the December shootings.

Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, was charged with two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under the age of 18 and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All are Class H felonies under Wisconsin law, subject to a fine of up to $10,000 or a prison sentence of up to six years, or both.

Rupnow was booked into the Dane County jail just before 5:30 a.m. Thursday, according to the jail’s online records.

He is the father of Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian School on Madison’s east side who entered the school in the middle of the morning on Dec. 16, 2024, shot and killed a teacher and a student, wounded six other people and then took her own life, all within a matter of minutes.

According to the criminal complaint, which was unsealed Thursday after Rupnow’s early morning arrest, Rupnow purchased two guns for his daughter: a 22-caliber handgun and later a Glock 9 mm pistol — the weapon that was used in the shooting. He said Natalie helped pay for the Glock and he purchased it for her from a gun store, the complaint states.

“All of these weapons, including [a third] one that was about to be gifted to the same teen, were purchased legally,” Madison Police Department Acting Chief John Patterson said at a Thursday afternoon press conference.

“There was a gun safe in the home. Based on our investigation, it did not stop the teenager from having regular access” to the contents, he said.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the case “is a call and an action to hold parents accountable … if their children can access their firearms.”

Rhodes-Conway said she wanted to see the Legislature take up “a number of really common sense proposals that have been around for years” to reduce gun violence. Those include measures such as universal background checks before people can purchase a gun as well as “red flag” laws that empower the courts to remove guns from owners who may represent a credible threat to others.

“The other piece of this is really making sure that responsible gun owners are doing everything they can to make sure that those guns do not fall into the hands of people who should not have them,” she said.

Patterson said Rupnow has been cooperative with police throughout the investigation.

In interviews with police, Natalie’s parents as well as two friends described her behavior as depressed and sometimes angry at her parents, who are divorced.

“Why would a 15-year-old open fire in her school and murder a teacher, classmates, and injure six others? We may never fully understand that horror,” Patterson said. “We do know the teenager had a fascination with weapons and school shootings.”

The complaint states that in June 2022 Madison police officers told Jeffrey Rupnow “of high-risk behavior that [Natalie] was engaging in via the internet.” The complaint does not elaborate further on that report. “I can’t speak further to the follow-up that was done” at that time, Patterson said.

Patterson said the investigation remains open in the case. He declined to comment about reports that people in other states were in touch with Natalie Rupnow online.

According to the complaint, Jeffrey Rupnow told police he had 11 guns, including two that were considered Natalie’s. He told police his daughter became interested in guns after he took her to a friend’s farm to shoot guns about two years ago and that they would occasionally go to a shooting range.

Because of her interest, Rupnow told police he bought her a 22-caliber handgun and later the Glock, according to the complaint.

The complaint states that Rupnow described occasional comments by his daughter about wanting to kill herself, but that he generally viewed those remarks as attention-seeking behavior.

Rupnow told police he had a gun safe where he kept all of the guns, including those he had purchased for his daughter. The safe was locked with a security code. He told police he had not told his daughter the code itself, but that he had told her that it was his Social Security number backwards, in case she needed to get into it.

The complaint states that police found maps of the school and a cardboard mockup that appeared to be of the school building among Natalie Rupnow’s things at home.

Police also found notebooks and what Patterson called a “manifesto” — a six-page document titled “War Against Humanity.” That and other documents suggested a fascination with other mass shootings, including one in 2007 by an 18-year-old in Finland, which she noted in one of her writings took place two years after she was born.

In addition, police found and reviewed 30 sets of camcorder videos, some of them with Natalie handling weapons and some depicting what appeared to be animal mutilation, according to the complaint.

According to the complaint, Natalie took both of her handguns to the school on Dec. 16, the day of the shooting, but apparently used only the Glock.

The complaint states she arrived at the school just before 10:40 a.m. and entered a classroom just before 10:50 a.m.

A student in the classroom, a study hall, told police that once in the classroom, Natalie held the gun with both hands and aimed it at the teacher who was sitting at her desk in the front of the room. The student said he heard gunshots and ran to the back of the room, where he hid behind a beanbag chair.

After the shooting stopped, the student, who was wounded in the leg, saw Natalie Rupnow lying on the floor on her back, with the gun in her hand. The student told police he removed the gun from her hand and put it in a drawer “because he wanted to make sure that no one else got a hold of it,” the complaint states. The police later retrieved the gun from the drawer.

The teacher, Erin Michelle West, and one student, Rubi Bergara, were both killed, according to the Dane County Medical Examiner’s office. Six other students were wounded. One remains hospitalized, Patterson said.

House Democrats think their most likely strategy to prevent major cuts to Medicaid or other popular federal programs in the current budget reconciliation process will be to win over a few House Republicans.

“We just need three Republicans, basically nationwide, to say no to something,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) at a Q-and-A session with reporters Wednesday in his Madison office.

The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress are using the complicated budget reconciliation process to pass a spending plan that will allow them to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

As part of that, House Republicans passed a blueprint calling for $880 billion in cuts to programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Medicaid represents the largest expense item in the committee’s purview, and analysts have said Congress could only hit that target by making Medicaid cuts.

Pocan said estimates of the cost of preserving the tax cuts have risen in Washington, from $4.5 trillion in the original House proposal to “more like $7 trillion in tax cuts” in the current proposal combined from House and Senate alternatives.

The objective for House Democrats currently is to make cuts to Medicaid harder for GOP members to go along with, Pocan said. In Wisconsin, about 1.3 million residents are enrolled in Medicaid, including one third of the children in the state and 55% of seniors in nursing homes.

“You know, the more they hear that, at some point they may listen,” Pocan said of Republican members who won swing districts by narrow margins — and, he argues, they could push back against those sorts of cuts.

“I don’t expect them to maybe say it publicly and maybe to hold a town hall and say it, but if they say it privately in their caucus, that’s good enough, as long as three people won’t support something,” Pocan said. “That’s enough to kill something, right? So that’s kind of my goal is to keep facilitating that.”

The focus, though, is not on stopping the tax cuts, but stopping the cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs.

“If we could stop that, and we could stop, maybe, some of the education cuts that might otherwise come … funds for low-income [districts], funds for special ed, I think they’re still going to move forward with their tax cut bill,” Pocan said.

He speculated that under those circumstances, the GOP majority would pay for the tax cut with a deficit increase.

“Is that a good answer? No,” Pocan said. “But is it better than seeing people lose their health care right now or their food assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? Yeah. So you know my job is to wake up in the morning and get excited about bad choices rather than the worst choices.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin has already set a new record for enrollment, according to preliminary information from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The health care marketplace, https://healthcare.gov, was established as part of the Affordable Care Act for consumers who don’t have affordable health insurance through work or through government programs such as Medicaid. Individuals and families can purchase health insurance policies at Healthcare.gov.

The most recent federal data from CMS shows sign-ups through Jan. 4. On Friday, Gov. Tony Evers announced that in Wisconsin, 306,470 residents had signed up as of that date — an all-time high for the state.

Through 2025, plans purchased through the marketplace are also supported by enhanced federal subsidies, lowering their monthly insurance premium cost depending on a family’s income.

The future of the subsidies beyond this year is uncertain. Advocates are trying to pressure Republicans in Congress to maintain them as they negotiate other tax changes in the coming months.

Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) have introduced legislation to extend the enhanced subsidies and make them permanent.

The ACA advocacy group Protect Our Care cheered the legislation when it was introduced last week. “If Republicans succeed in taking away these tax credits, health care costs will increase by an average of $2,400 for working families, and five million people will lose their health care altogether,” said Leslie Dach, the group’s chair.

For people seeking guidance in how to choose coverage, Covering Wisconsin, at https://coveringwi.org/, is a federally funded navigator to help people to assess their health insurance options, including through the federal health insurance marketplace.

The Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI) and the Department of Health Services (DHS) also outline options through WisCovered, a joint website. OCI also has a website that consumers can visit to find which ACA-approved insurers are operating in their region of the state: https://oci.wi.gov/Pages/Consumers/FindHealthInsurer.aspx.

In February 2018 Melissa Hubbard underwent surgery to remove part of her colon. What she didn’t know until afterward was that her ovaries were removed as well.

Removing Hubbard’s ovaries had been recommended to Hubbard’s surgeon by her gynecologist to treat another painful condition that Hubbard was dealing with. But while the gynecologist had previously discussed the ovary surgery with her, Hubbard wasn’t ready to go forward with that procedure. She was unaware that the gynecologist had suggested it to the surgeon who was operating on her colon.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit that Hubbard has filed against the gynecologist, Dr. Carol Neuman. The lawsuit argues that Neuman’s recommendation to the surgeon without Hubbard’s knowledge was an act of medical negligence.

The lawsuit Hubbard filed against Neuman hasn’t gone to trial yet. The Ob/Gyn doctor, through her attorneys, argues that the lawsuit should be dismissed on summary judgment.

The lawsuit — and the doctor’s argument to throw it out — revolve around Wisconsin’s law that requires informed consent from patients for medical treatment.

Neuman’s lawyers argue that the doctor had no legal responsibility for Hubbard’s surgery under that law and no duty to tell Hubbard about what was merely Neuman’s recommendation to the surgeon, since Neuman didn’t perform the surgery herself.

A Rock County circuit judge disagreed with the doctor’s lawyers and rejected the summary judgment motion. The 4th District Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld the circuit court’s refusal to dismiss the case. Now Neuman’s lawyers have asked the state Supreme Court to reverse those decisions.

Writing for a three-judge District 4 appeals court panel in March 2024, Judge Chris Taylor found that “the duty to inform a patient about ‘the availability of reasonable alternative medical modes of treatment and about the benefits and risks of these treatments’ applies to any physician who treats a patient, regardless of whether that physician actually performs the disclosed treatment options.”

According to the appeals court’s summary of the case, in 2018 Hubbard was in Neuman’s care for treatment of endometriosis — a condition in which the same sort of tissue that lines the inside of the uterus also grows outside the uterus. Endometriosis can cause pain as well as infertility, according to the Mayo Clinic.

In a medical note quoted in the original lawsuit, Neuman wrote that she told Hubbard she should consider having at least her left uterus tube and ovary removed, or both tubes and ovaries.

Those procedures would leave Hubbard unable to conceive a child, but Neuman wrote in her clinical note, “I believe her endometriosis is so severe she may need reproductive specialists to help her. She does not want to see them because her insurance does not cover this option.”

Hubbard did not agree to the removal of her reproductive organs, according to the lawsuit.

Neuman also referred Hubbard to a surgeon for a separate procedure: the removal of part of her colon due to a concern about cancer, according to Hubbard’s lawyer, Guy Fish of Milton.

Before the colon surgery, the doctor made a recommendation to the surgeon that he could remove Hubbard’s ovaries at the same time.

“Hubbard, prior to her surgery on February 13, 2018, at no time advised Neuman that she opted to have an ovary or ovaries be surgically removed” during the operation, however, according to Hubbard’s lawsuit.

Neuman and the surgeon, Dr. Michael McGauley, “engaged in pre-surgery discussions and planning … without including or briefing Hubbard,” the lawsuit states. At one point in their discussions, the plan was for Neuman to remove Hubbard’s tubes, ovaries and uterus, with McGauley performing the colon surgery in the same procedure.

Hubbard was not informed of those conversations, the lawsuit states. On the day that the surgery took place, McGauley performed the colon surgery and also removed Hubbard’s ovaries himself.

“Had Hubbard been apprised of Neuman’s pre-surgery recommendations to McGauley . . . Hubbard would have immediately cancelled the scheduled surgery for February 13, 2018 in order to consider all her options,” the lawsuit states.

Defending the motion to dismiss the case, Neuman’s lawyers have argued that a doctor’s recommendation to another doctor shouldn’t be subject to the state’s informed consent law.

“A recommendation is not an order or a prescription,” wrote Neuman’s legal team, from the Corneille Law Group in Madison, in a Supreme Court brief. The lawyers argued that not disclosing to Hubbard the recommendation Neuman made to the surgeon should not be treated as a violation of the state’s informed consent law.

“Treating physicians who discuss the patients’ care must be able to freely exchange their thoughts, opinions, advice and counsel without concern that they may each be liable for failing to disclose the content of those communications to the patient,” the brief for Neuman argues.

The brief asks the Supreme Court to send the case back to the Rock County circuit court with an order to dismiss the lawsuit.

But Hubbard’s lawyer argues that it’s in the interest of patients to encourage disclosure, including of communications among doctors.

“Doesn’t a treating physician more fully fulfill his/her duty by disclosing more pertinent medical information to the patient?” Fish asked in a brief to the high court.

The lower court also rejected the assertion that holding the gynecologist responsible for providing informed consent for her recommendation to the surgeon would squelch doctors from freely consulting one another.

In making their ruling, the appeals court judges focused on whether the state law would not apply to Neuman even assuming all of the factual allegations in the lawsuit were true.

The effect of Neuman’s recommendation — the loss of Hubbard’s ovaries without her knowledge ahead of time — was instrumental enough to consider Neuman a “treating physician,” even though she didn’t perform the surgery, the lower court judges wrote.

In making the recommendation to the surgeon, they wrote, Neuman arguably had a responsibility to disclose to the patient the risks of the procedure, the probabilities of success and any alternative treatments that might be available.

In short, they ruled, Neuman failed to make the case for dismissing the case outright.

Since 2018, Marc Herstand has been on the forefront of a campaign to ban mental health professionals in Wisconsin from counseling clients with the goal of changing their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Conversion therapy” has been denounced by mainstream professional organizations for doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and counselors. “People likened it to child abuse and torture,” says Herstand, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter. “LGBT kids who are not accepted have a much, much higher rate of suicidality and mental health issues.”

Twenty states — and several local communities in Wisconsin — have banned the practice. And since late April 2024, the state professional licensing board for therapists, counselors and social workers has labeled conversion therapy as unprofessional conduct.

“It has no place whatsoever in the mental health professions, frankly, in our society,” Herstand says.

The provision banning the practice is precarious, however. Twice it’s been blocked by one of the Wisconsin Legislature’s most powerful committees. And advocates for the LGBTQ community fear it could be blocked again.

“Undoing this rule would overturn the work of the state’s mental health experts and expose young people and their families to unnecessary and lasting harms,” says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the national LGBTQ advocy group The Trevor Project.

Next week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit that could determine whether the conversion therapy ban survives — and whether that legislative body has been overstepping its bounds in overriding state regulations that address everything from environmental quality to public health.

The Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) has been a thorn in the side of the administration of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers since he took office in January 2019. The committee’s power under Wisconsin law to stymie regulations enacted by the executive branch was one of three issues that Evers identified in a lawsuit the governor filed in October 2023 charging that Republican leaders of the Wisconsin Legislature were exercising an unconstitutional “legislative veto” to thwart his administration from carrying out its duties.

The lawsuit went straight to the Supreme Court. This past July the Court ruled 6-1 in Evers’ favor on the first of those three issues, throwing out state laws that had allowed the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to block how the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources spends money budgeted for the Knowles-Nelson stewardship fund.

In October, the Court dismissed the lawsuit’s second issue, an objection to actions by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) that had held up raises for University of Wisconsin system employees to pressure the UW into eliminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. A deal between Vos and the UW Board of Regents ended the delay in December 2023.

The Court also said it would take up the third issue: the power that JCRAR has exercised to block regulations, sometimes repeatedly. Over the last six years, the 10-member committee’s six Republican lawmakers have voted to block or rewrite rules drawn up by state agencies on matters including environmental regulations, vaccine requirements and public health protections.

Two rules blocked

The Evers lawsuit identifies two JCRAR actions. One was the committee’s vote in January 2023 blocking the conversion therapy ban. The second was a committee vote blocking a state building code update. Both measures were produced under the umbrella of the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS).

The building code revision was developed over three years in a series of meetings and hearings following national and international model documents under the direction of a statewide professional building code body. Brian Flannery, a veteran building inspector who was part of the code revision process, told the Wisconsin Examiner in a 2023 interview that at two hearings, there were no objections to the code change brought to the group.

In August 2023, however, a Senate committee voted along party lines against approving the new building code following a hearing in which objections were raised by business lobbyists. JCRAR held a vote Sept. 29, 2023, approving an “indefinite objection” — blocking DSPS from reintroducing the code update unless the Legislature passes a bill authorizing it.

The JCRAR vote was 6-4 on party lines, with only Republicans supporting the motion, and was conducted by paper ballot, without a hearing and without the committee meeting in person.

Therapists’ ethics rules

The rule opposing conversion therapy for LGBTQ persons was part of an ethics revision by the Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board.

Herstand of the National Association of Social Workers said he first appealed to the examining board in 2018 to ban conversion therapy. Later that year the board began the process of revising the state professional code and added to the list of actions considered “unprofessional conduct” a provision that began, “Employing or promoting any intervention or method that has the purpose of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity…”

“When I talk to survivors of conversion therapy, I hear their struggles with loss of trust — trust for family members, trust for licensed medical professionals and the entire health care system,” Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, an LGBTQ advocacy group, tells the Wisconsin Examiner. “Conversion therapy really erodes that ability to trust, and that makes interacting with the health care system in the future more difficult.”

A study from the Trevor Project also shows “a significant increase in suicide attempts, and not only that, but also a significant increase in multiple suicide attempts,” Swetz adds.

After hearings and the board’s unanimous vote to advance the rule change, however, JCRAR voted 6-4 to put the change on a temporary hold until the end of the 2021-22 legislative session.

At the end of November 2022, the examining board republished the new ethics code, effective Dec. 1 of that year. Six weeks later, JCRAR convened again, holding a public hearing.

The Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules voted Jan. 12, 2023, to block an examining board’s ban on conversion therapy. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)

Mental health professionals and LGBTQ advocates urged the committee to allow the new code to stand. Herstand was among them, describing conversion therapy as “Child abuse. Torture. Major mental health and suicidal risk. Unprofessional conduct. Fake therapy.”

Testifying in favor of throwing out the rule, Julaine Appling, executive director of the conservative Wisconsin Family Council, said the ban violated professionals’ freedom of speech and religion.

JCRAR again voted 6-4 to suspend the rule for the rest of the 2023-24 legislative session. The committee co-chair, Rep. Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee) said that “the merits of any conversion therapy or any other type of therapy” was “a question for the Legislature as it is public policy and deals with speech issues.”

Nine months later, Evers filed his lawsuit, calling both of the committee actions examples of an unconstitutional legislative veto that hampered the executive branch from doing its job.

In April, with the Legislature wrapped up for the rest of 2024, the examining board reinstated the code banning conversion therapy.

Sending rules to limbo

Under Wisconsin law, JCRAR can object to a rule after it is promulgated, either temporarily — for the balance of a legislative session — or indefinitely. State law also holds that if lawmakers introduce legislation that codifies a rule objection, the rule stays blocked until the legislation is vetoed by the governor.

Instead, however, lawmakers have introduced such legislation and referred it to committee, where it has remained dormant for the rest of the legislative session in order to avoid a veto that would restore the blocked rule.

The Evers administration argues that by blocking regulations, JCRAR is taking over the power that the Wisconsin Constitution confers on the governor to carry out the laws.

“In other words, when JCRAR vetoes a proposed rule, it effectively amends the statute under which the executive agency proposed that rule,” a brief filed on behalf of Evers argues.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

“By proposing the conversion therapy rule, the [therapy licensing board] exercised that statutory authority. By objecting to that rule, JCRAR effectively withdrew a share of the statutory authority the Legislature had granted to the Board” — in essence, the brief argues, unilaterally rewriting the state law that authorizes the licensing board to set the profession’s ethical standards.

“JCRAR does not have that power—only the full Legislature does,” the brief states.

The committee’s action — and the state laws that empower it — undercut the legal right of the profession to set its standards, Herstand tells the Wisconsin Examiner.

“It’s an issue of the ability of professions, which is delineated in the law, in statute, to set their own ethical standards, when some in the Legislature are trying to prevent that,” he says. “To me, that’s a violation of statute.”

A brief filed on behalf of the Legislature’s Republican leaders argues otherwise. A 1992 state Supreme Court ruling upheld the right of the committee and the Legislature to suspend rules as part of its oversight of the executive branch. While the Evers administration argues that the earlier decision was wrong and should be overturned, the legislators’ brief contends it should be honored as legal precedent.

In defense of JCRAR’s powers, the legislators’ brief describes regulations as the product of power “delegated” by the lawmakers — an argument that lawyers for the governor reject.

A friend of the court brief by a group of legal scholars, including Miriam Seifter and Bryna Godar of the University of Wisconsin Law School, sides with the administration. The power that Wisconsin law grants to JCRAR is unlike that found in other states and unconstitutional, the brief argues.

“Wisconsin’s anomalous statutory scheme allows a handful of legislators to determine whether administrative rules are lawful; to suspend otherwise final rules forever or rescind them once in force; and to act without deadlines or judicial review,” the brief states. “The Constitution readily permits other forms of agency oversight, but it precludes these committee overreaches into the domains of the executive branch, the judiciary, and the people.”

Milwaukee State Rep. Ryan Clancy readily admits he was the odd one out last week at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC, a nonprofit that brings together state lawmakers and corporations and drafts model legislation, describes its point of view as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It has produced state policies embraced almost solely by Republicans — drafted with input from corporate members of the organization.

Clancy is neither a Republican politician nor a corporate official. “To the best of my knowledge, I would be the only Democrat — and almost certainly the only socialist” at the States & Nation Policy Summit ALEC held Tuesday through Thursday, Clancy said in an interview. But as a state legislator, he was technically welcome at the event.

On the last day, however, Clancy was summarily kicked out and told his registration would be withdrawn and the fee refunded. While declining to explain how, an ALEC spokesman said Clancy was being “disruptive” — something Clancy categorically denies.

Attending an ALEC event was important to him, said Clancy, who is just wrapping up his first term in the Assembly after being elected in 2022. He wanted to see the process by which ALEC drafts model legislation and distributes bill proposals through its member lawmakers to statehouses around the country.

Clancy said that in his first term in Madison he has seen a lot of legislation circulate that originated in ALEC proposals. Those included more than a dozen bills putting restrictions on trans and nonbinary people, such as preventing gender affirming medical care for people under 18, he said.

“My oldest child is trans,” Clancy said in an interview. “It was just horrific to have to bring together the community to push back on those. But it was also good to know about them in advance.”

Clancy said the anti-trans legislation points to priorities that he believes ALEC has beyond the talking points it makes about individual liberty, free markets and limited government.

“Even more economic-seeming policy discussions were often peppered with anti-trans and anti-DEI comments behind the scenes,” Clancy said.

While his attendance was cut short, he said, his time at the session offered a preview of ALEC-inspired legislation that he expects to see in the coming session of the state Legislature, and an opportunity for his fellow Democratic lawmakers to “figure out how we can push back on that.”

Democratic tradition

When Clancy joined ALEC and signed up to attend last week’s policy summit, he was following a tradition among Wisconsin Democrats in the state Legislature, who have long viewed the organization with suspicion.

The first Democrat to decide to attend ALEC sessions was then-state Rep. Mark Pocan, who began attending the meetings two decades ago, before he became a member of Congress. He was succeeded by Democratic Rep. Chris Taylor, who has since left the Legislature when Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to Dane County circuit court, before her election to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.

Most recently in 2023, Reps. Kristina Shelton (D-Green Bay) and Francesca Hong (D-Madison) attended an ALEC annual meeting in Florida.

ALEC has its lawmaker members join two task forces, and Clancy, a former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, chose education and the environment.

In the education task force, Clancy caught a discussion about legislation that would give families who home-school their children or enroll them in private schools a tax credit to offset the taxes they pay to support public schools.

“They were looking at it as fairness because [those families] shouldn’t have to pay for public schools and also pay for homeschooling or a private school as well,” he said.

As proposed, the tax credit would be non-refundable — meaning that a taxpayer would only collect up to the amount of their tax liability.

“What that means is if you are fairly well off, like middle class or rich, and you have a big tax liability at the end of the year, you’d get that back,” Clancy said. A lower-income family with a lower tax liability wouldn’t get as much, even if their school expenses were just as high.

He said another lawmaker suggested that in the name of fairness, the tax credit should be made refundable — paying the balance of the credit amount in cash to someone whose tax liability was less than the credit’s full value.

The lawmaker presenting the proposal rejected the suggestion, saying that “it was not supposed to be, quote, a wealth redistribution program,” Clancy said. The lawmaker called that “a bright line and she absolutely would never support that.”

Recycling — conservative or ‘woke’?

At the environmental task force session he attended, the principal topic was recycling — a subject that provoked conflicting opinions.

One participant advocating incentives for recycling disposable cans and bottles instead of sending them to landfills declared, “Conservation is conservative,” according to Clancy. “And then you have other people very angry about this saying no … recycling is ‘woke.’”

Still others countered in defense of recycling aluminum in particular, making the argument that “communist China is going to continue to get a leg up because we import aluminum from communist China all the time,” Clancy said.

Those arguments revolved around a model bill that would establish a deposit-based recycling system operated by the beverage industry rather than the state, with the deposit funds that consumers don’t collect staying with the industry, offsetting the costs for recycling initiatives and for marketing the system to consumers. “This would be a handout to corporations,” Clancy said.

Clancy said that throughout the meetings he kept his own reactions to the proposals to himself and listened to other lawmakers as they discussed the issues. He took notes and photographed information slides with his phone, something that he said he saw many other participants doing.

But he said he never spoke up during any of the presentations, raised questions or publicly engaged presenters or other participants.

“The extent of my behavior in both the task forces and the workshops was sitting there taking notes, holding up the [phone] camera and getting pictures of what was going on, just like all of the other participants who were not told to leave for that same behavior,” Clancy said.

Kicked out of the meeting

In the midst of the last session he attended on Thursday, however, a hotel security staff member came to him and escorted him from the room. Outside he was told that his registration had been withdrawn.

Clancy, who recorded the exchange with the security staff member, asked why he was being thrown out. The security staffer deferred the answer to ALEC officials, but Clancy said he’s never been told what violations he was accused of.

When registering, Clancy said he was directed to a code of conduct that ALEC has posted directed to media covering the event, but that he has seen no other such list of rules for participants. In any event, he said, he took pains to not draw attention to himself.

“I have recordings of all the things that I was in, and you can hear me not asking questions,” Clancy said. “That’s really difficult for me,” he added. “I mean, to be in those spaces, to hear them saying those things, and not to say what the hell is wrong with you people was an act of will on my part, and I succeeded. I managed not to say any of the things that a reasonable person would say in that situation, because I didn’t want to be, you know, accused of disrupting or anything else.”

Clancy questioned an unnamed ALEC representative whether he was being thrown out because he’d been identified as a Democrat or a socialist. He suggested that in doing so the organization would be running afoul of its 501(c)(3) tax-exemption and IRS rules under which “they can’t give undue influence to inside members of their group and exclude people based on partisan things.”

In response to the Wisconsin Examiner’s inquiry, ALEC’s communications director, Lars Dalseide, replied in an email message.

“All are welcome at ALEC events, where all attendees are asked to abide by our long-standing code of conduct. One that ensures a welcoming and productive experience for everyone in attendance. Sadly, the individual in question failed to adhere to these guidelines. On the final day of the conference, after several complaints, he was asked to leave,” Dalseide said.

In a subsequent email, Dalseide declined to clarify what actions of Clancy’s constituted conduct violations.

“We don’t release those kinds of details to the press,” he said. “If we did, then every speaker, member, and guest wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking freely at our events.”

While Dalseide said that attendees were reminded of the code of conduct at each session, Clancy denied that.

“They did not ever make reminders of any code of conduct at the beginning of any session, nor did I ever make a single comment or ask a question within any of them,” Clancy said. “I still don’t know what rules they’re accusing me of violating, or why speakers wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking if they knew the rules for attendees.”

Dalseide also relayed an additional statement from Leah Vukmir, a former Wisconsin state senator and former ALEC National Chair:

“The Wisconsin Socialist Party has been sending people to disrupt ALEC meetings for years, so it’s no surprise that the newest member of the Wisconsin Socialist Party would try to cause trouble at this year’s event. As a former National Chairman, I can attest to the fact that ALEC has always welcomed all views as long as individuals conduct themselves in a mature, professional manner.”

Clancy said he is a Democratic Party member and that, while he also identifies politically as a socialist, he is not a member of any Wisconsin Socialist Party, nor had he heard of any past actions by socialist-aligned groups to disrupt ALEC events.

Rep. Pocan was reached through his Congressional office and asked if during his years of attending ALEC he recalled any socialist groups attending or engaging in disruptive behavior.

“Nope,” Pocan replied in a text message.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and two other Democratic governors joined Friday in condemning Donald Trump after reports that as president Trump shipped COVID-19 tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin early in the pandemic.

In a new book, journalist Bob Woodward writes Trump sent the tests to Putin secretly, and that Putin told Trump not to reveal what he had done to avoid political repercussions.

The book, to be published Tuesday, Oct. 15, was the subject of a Washington Post report published Tuesday. A Trump spokesman dismissed the book’s claims about Trump as false.

In a joint statement Friday, Evers, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wrote, “Former President Trump betrayed us.”

When the three governors sought in the first months of the pandemic to obtain COVID-19 testing kits, ventilators, and N-95 masks, the federal government “abandoned us to fend for ourselves,” the governors added. Trump and the federal government ignored requests for help at a time when the pandemic’s death toll was still unknown and hospitals were beleaguered as they tried to treat patients and protect health care workers, according to the governors. “It was a terrifying time.”

The governors assert that after Trump rejected their pleas to ramp up domestic production of those supplies under the Defense Production Act, states turned to “price gouging foreign suppliers” and purchased what they needed using state funds.

“Now we are reading reports that during this unprecedented and historic public health crisis, while Americans were dying and desperate for life saving supplies, former President Trump was personally sending testing kits to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the governors wrote. “For that, we demand answers.”

The statement claims that Trump’s “cozy relationship with Putin has been well documented,” and that the new report shows him “putting a foreign dictator before Americans, threatening our national security in the process.”

“Former President Trump betrayed us. Americans suffered during the pandemic. 1.2 million Americans died, many because they did not have access to adequate supplies at a critical time,” the governors wrote. “Donald Trump must explain why he put his personal friendship with Putin, a ruthless dictator and war criminal, over the American people.”

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

Two dozen Wisconsin Republicans, including former lawmakers, other former elected officials and a GOP sitting district attorney, have signed an open letter declaring their support for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for president and condemning the Republican nominee former President Donald Trump.

The Harris campaign released the letter early Thursday, describing it as the product of months of outreach by the campaign and by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to Republicans.

“We, the undersigned, are Republicans from across Wisconsin who bring the same message: Donald Trump does not align with Wisconsin values,” the letter says. “To ensure our democracy and our economy remain strong for another four years, we must elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the White House.”

The letter was released as part of the launch of a formal Wisconsin Republicans for Harris-Walz organization, with just over a month to go before the Nov. 5 election.

“Wisconsin Republicans for Harris-Walz will play a pivotal role in facilitating Republican-to-Republican voter contact,” said the Harris-Walz campaign announcement Thursday. Through phone banking and networking with “Republican organizations, businesses, and community groups,” the GOP-oriented group will focus “in part on the more than 120,000 Wisconsinites who voted against Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary earlier this year,” the campaign announcement said.

Trump’s Wisconsin primary opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, finished with more than 16% of the vote in Ozaukee, 12% in Washington and 14% in Waukesha counties.

The letter and the announcement coincide with a Harris campaign trip Thursday to Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party in the 19th century.

The letter makes clear that the signers do not intend to change political parties.

“We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris. But what we do agree upon is more important,” the letter reads. “We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”

The single current office holder signing the letter is Tom Bilski, the district attorney for Buffalo County. Other signers include three Republican former members of the Wisconsin Legislature: Former Sen. Barbara Lorman, Fort Atkinson, and former Reps. Margaret Lewis of the Town of Middleton and Susan Vergeront of Sun Prairie.

Also signing are former Brown County Republican Chair Mark Becker, former Iowa County Sheriff Steve Michek and Tracy Ann Mangold, former Republican Party secretary for the 8th Congressional District.

The balance of the 24 signers of the letter do not list current or former political titles. Their home towns include Madison, Milwaukee, communities in Southeast Wisconsin, northern outlying suburbs of Milwaukee, Appleton and Hudson among other places.

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

Eight years ago Lori McCammon cast her presidential ballot for Donald Trump.

Since 2020, however, she’s been part of a vocal national effort involving former Trump voters to keep the former president from returning to the White House.

“I don’t know if I could bring myself to vote for any Republican again,” says McCammon. “If they backed Trump in any way, they will never get my vote.”

McCammon, 69, lives in a house with a view overlooking the Mississippi River in the Buffalo County community of Alma, about 55 miles north of La Crosse. Born in Nebraska, she moved around the country with her family growing up, graduating from high school in La Crosse.

As an adult she wound up in southern California, where she lived for some 35 years until moving back to Wisconsin in 2017 after a high school reunion.

For most of her life, McCammon says, she avoided paying much attention to politics. “I dreaded election years because of all of the ads,” she says.

“I’ve got to be brutally honest, if I had not been called on the carpet by a gentleman my dad used to work with years ago about voting, I don’t know that I would have been voting,” McCammon says. “By the time he was done lecturing me about the importance of voting, I’ve never failed to vote since then.”

GOP was ‘a safer bet’

More often than not, she cast those votes for Republicans. “I think I paid just enough attention that I felt the Republicans were a safer bet,” she says.

She voted for George W. Bush for president in 2000 and 2004. She admired Arizona Sen. John McCain and says she would have voted for him in 2008 — until he picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

“I think he was just trying to get the female vote. She was an insult to female intelligence,” McCammon says.

She was happy to have voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016, she voted for Trump “because I thought eight years of Clinton was enough.” Looking back, she adds, “I was so very wrong.”

In her day-to-day life, though, McCammon says she didn’t really follow political news until the 2016 election.

“I only started paying attention when Trump came on the scene,” she says. “My thought was, maybe we need someone who is not a career politician. Maybe we need somebody with a fresh set of eyes.”

In her community, “we had a challenge with illegal immigrants,” McCammon says. “I have absolutely no problem with anyone who wants to come to this country — I mean, why wouldn’t they want to? But it was the illegal part of it. So, of course, I believed him when he said, ‘I have a plan, and Mexico’s going to pay for the wall.’ Well, I didn’t realize that was all a lie.”

Even though choosing Trump that year was in line with many of her past votes, she says she found herself regretting that choice almost immediately. And when it comes to politics, “I’ve paid very close attention ever since then.”

‘Revolving door’ at the White House

Trump’s public statements quickly soured on McCammon. A friend introduced her to the cable channel MSNBC and commentator Rachel Maddow’s program. She became a regular viewer of Maddow and other MSNBC regulars, particularly Lawrence O’Donnell and Brian Williams.

Trump had “a revolving door on the White House. I mean, he just fired people and fired people and fired people,” McCammon says. “He turned the presidency into literally a joke.”

McCammon says she was disturbed to learn that as president Trump accepted the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a 2018 meeting in Helsinki that there was no Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 election — contrary to what U.S. intelligence agencies had found.

Trump’s exchange of warm, flattering correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “was an embarrassment,” McCammon says.

Along with Maddow, O’Donnell and Williams, McCammon particularly took to the programs of another MSNBC host, Nicolle Wallace. “She’s a former Republican, and she’s worked in the White House, and I appreciate listening to people who kind of went the same way I did for years and then woke up and realized that they were in the wrong universe,” McCammon says.

TV ads in 2020 for Republican Voters Against Trump caught McCammon’s attention. She went to the website listed on the screen and watched videos posted there. There was an invitation to record her own story, and she took it.

“At the end of that one, I remember I was almost starting to get emotional, because I was begging the Republicans to do something — just begging them,” she says.

Sometime in the week that followed she got an email from RVAT, asking if she would speak to news organizations. She agreed and was interviewed by ABC and CNN, “and then it just rolled from there.”

In all, she did interviews with journalists from eight countries, she recalls. The most memorable might have been a BBC correspondent, who expressed concern about the future of NATO if Trump won reelection in 2020. She also recorded a video for the Democratic super PAC American Bridge.

Keeping the peace with neighbors

In 2024 she has again recorded a spot for the Republican Voters Against Trump. She begins the video by talking about the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by people attempting to stop the certification of the election that had just been won by Joe Biden. “Trump is 100% responsible for what happened on Jan. 6,” she tells the camera.

In the video McCammon goes on to criticize Project 2025, the policy agenda for the next GOP president that was assembled by former Trump advisors, for proposals she fears would jeopardize her Social Security benefits and her Medicare coverage.

McCammon was a one-day spectator at the Democratic National Convention as a guest of American Bridge, and she was recognized at a panel discussion about suburban voters, where she says members of the audience came up to her and thanked her for speaking out.

Back home in Alma, McCammon has friends and neighbors who share her views, and others whom she knows remain Trump supporters.

“I kind of know where they stand,” she says. “I don’t want to create any challenges, so I don’t. If they ask me, I’ll talk about it, but otherwise we don’t.”

McCammon, an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, says she admires Republicans including former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan who have endorsed Harris and condemned Trump.

And she’s angry and frustrated by Republican lawmakers who criticized Trump, sometimes harshly, before he won the GOP nomination in 2016 and have since fallen in line to support him.

McCammon allows that becoming a vocal critic of the former president has been an unexpected journey.

“All I wanted to do is just go on the website and record my little video and have people watch it and hope that it would change somebody’s mind,” she says. “And then it just snowballed from there.”

MILWAUKEE — While 2,500 Republican delegates were gathering to nominate Donald Trump at the party convention in Milwaukee this week, a group of Trump opponents gathered four blocks away to talk about the existential threat the GOP candidate poses to the country.

The event was organized by Principles First, which calls itself “a nationwide grassroots movement of pro-democracy, anti-Trump conservatives.” Over the course of three hours about 100 people dropped by.

“The Republican Party is sick, okay — it has been led astray by populist demagogues and it has abandoned its principles,” Heath Mayo, president and founder of the group, told the crowd inside Best Place, part of the redeveloped Pabst Brewing complex just west of the convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

He condemned a convention speaker for saying the Russian invasion of Ukraine “wasn’t Vladimir Putin’s fault” but instead that of the United States. “That is absurd. It’s dangerous,” Mayo said. “It is absolutely antithetical to anything the Republican Party has ever stood for.”

He expressed dismay at the platform given to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien for “a complete class warfare speech.”

And Mayo summarized a recurring sentiment he heard while watching the convention: “That there are certain Americans out there — whether it’s based on their race, their religion, their job or their occupation, who are real Americans,” while others for the same reason are “not quite real Americans.”

That is “the most pernicious, new idea in the Republican Party that exists, because it goes right to the heart of what America is supposed to be,” Mayo asserted. “Where we all, no matter our race, religion, who we love, have the same opportunity to succeed and realize the benefits of this nation. And the Republican Party on that stage has abandoned it over and over and over again in the interest of just populist political gain. And it is infuriating.”

‘Politically homeless’

The Principles First website describes the group’s founding in 2019 by people “on the right and center-right who were concerned about the health of American democracy.”

“We are what the pundits and the writers would say are the politically homeless,” said Mayo. “We are the most important and critical voting bloc in the country right now, because we have stood up and said, ‘Republican leaders, Democratic leaders, you cannot count on our votes in November. We may have voted with you in the primaries. But if you abandon our principles, you cannot count on our votes simply because you are a Republican.’”

Among the speakers at the event was Charlie Sykes, who was prompted to leave a long career in conservative talk radio by Trump’s election in 2016.

The Republican party is in the midst of “a wrenching change,” abandoning free markets and international engagement, said Sykes. “I don’t think we can overstate the enormity of the moment that we’re in right now.”

Sykes now edits the anti-Trump political news and commentary outlet The Bulwark.

“This is a party that is very, very clearly intending on forcibly deporting perhaps 10 million human beings when they get into power,” he said. “Which means you may be a couple of years away from one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time. We better talk about it.”

Wisconsin’s easy embrace of Trump

One of the few Wisconsin residents at the event besides Sykes was James Wigderson, a widely followed conservative writer who has been outspoken not just against Trump but against leaders of the state Republican Party and its most visible politicians, including those he once supported.

“I don’t see any organized opposition to Trump on the right in Wisconsin,” Wigderson says. “I just see the gradual erosion of Republican support in the suburbs that I’ve been watching from election cycle to election cycle. It’s falling without any organization or anything in the state that’s presenting a clear alternative.”

Wisconsin Republicans’ effortless shift to line up behind Trump even though he lost the state’s 2016 GOP primary had an important precedent, Wigderson believes: The state party establishment’s “seamless” embrace of the tea party movement in the previous decade.

In other states, “there was a definite tension” between tea party supporters and the local Republican establishment, he observed, but not so much in Wisconsin.

“Reince Priebus” — the state GOP chair at the time — “made a point of reaching out to the tea party and welcoming them into the Republican Party,” Wigderson says. “When Donald Trump came along, it was just a natural progression for that next step.”

Throughout the Principles First event, Wigderson listened intently, recording the conversation and making notes.

“I think, unfortunately, there’s still a muddle of views,” he said in an interview a day later. “And there doesn’t seem to be a clear path forward yet for anybody that’s conservative, but is anti-Trump.”

A wide range of perspectives

Anti-Trump conservatives came in all flavors during the three-hour session.

One was Amanda Stewart Sprowls, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group made up of supporters of Trump’s primary challenger, Nikki Haley.

In a panel discussion, Sprowls said she voted for Trump twice, but she’s finished with the former president. She pointed to his repeated infidelities in his marriages and her skepticism of his business practices.

“Is he trustworthy? No. Is he honorable? No. Will he pay his contractors? Well, no, right? There is no surprise in any of that,” she said. “And I think that as women … and as Haley voters, I think a lot of us understood that we just want better.”

Sprowls said that she might cast a write-in vote rather than voting for Democrats in November, however.

Sprowls mentioned in passing that she was a pro-choice Republican on abortion rights.

On the other hand, Kendal Unruh of Colorado, an evangelical Christian, said she has always opposed Trump but worked on the 2016 Republican platform committee to ensure the platform included language affirming “the fundamental right to life.”

Unruh criticized the party’s 2024 platform for muting its language on abortion and scorned “the Trump talking point of ‘platforms don’t matter.’”

She could never vote for a Democrat, Unruh said: “What do they represent to a value system that I share?”

And she left the Republican Party for much the same reason: “They certainly have elected the most immoral man probably in the history of the presidency,” Unruh said.

Stephanie Sharp is a cofounder of the super PAC Women4US with the goal of mobilizing women voters in swing states, including Wisconsin, to vote against Trump.

“There are not enough Republicans to elect Donald Trump,” she said. “There are not enough Democrats to elect whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being. They have to have the middle — it’s just math.”

Republicans for Democrats

Mayo said that “we’re gonna have to do everything we can to make sure we keep things on the track in November” — but he steered clear of an outright endorsement of the Democratic ticket.

The stars of the night weren’t so reticent. Several also forecast the collapse of the Republican Party, especially if Trump loses — as they hope he will.

“You either believe in this moment that he is a threat to our democracy or you don’t — stop there,” said Joe Walsh, a one-time tea party congressman from Illinois who voted for Trump in 2016 but subsequently renounced him.

“He stood [before] the country a month ago and he said, ‘If I lose, I won’t accept the results,’” Walsh said. Donald Trump Jr. suggested this week that if his father loses in November it would be because the election was stolen, he added.

“That is an attack on democracy,” Walsh said. “You either believe it, folks, or you don’t. And if you believe it, you have to vote for the only person who can defeat that man — and that’s the Democratic nominee, no matter who the hell it is.”

George Conway, now divorced from Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway after he spent most of Trump’s term in office publicly criticizing him, said he only understood Trump’s behavior after reading psychological analyses of the former president. Conway pulled out a pair of posters listing the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

“When you combine these two, this explains everything about Donald Trump,” Conway said. “It explains his criminality, the fact that he’s a rapist and a convicted felon, that he tried to overthrow democracy, explains his love for authoritarianism, his desire for vengeance, explains his racism, his misogyny — everything comes down to the fact that he is a narcissistic sociopath.”

Michael Steele, the first Black chair of the Republican National Committee, who parted ways with the party leadership after Trump’s rise in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump “is not worth the paper his name is written on,” he said. “Because he doesn’t care about you in this room. He doesn’t care about your neighbors, your family, your community. He doesn’t care about this country. He cares about himself.”

Steele said he would vote for Biden again.

“You cannot give up on us,” he said. “And I know it’s not easy. Right now, the Republican Party that I led, in which I was a county chairman, state chairman and elected official, needs the biggest political enema it has ever seen.

“And the only way they get it is if we give it to them. And the only way we give it to them is to vote.”

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

A Wisconsin member of Congress and a staff member of the peace group CODEPINK are each accusing the other of assault in an incident outside a Republican National Convention event Tuesday.

In a statement CODEPINK said the group’s staff member, Nour Jaghama, was shoved from behind by U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Prairie du Chien) while Jaghama and other CODEPINK members were in line for an event.

The event was a Republican women’s luncheon. In his own account of the incident, Van Orden posted on X that he “was assaulted by what appeared to be a member of the pro-Hamas group CODEPINK.” The post did not describe the actions that he said constituted an assault.

“A nearby police officer witnessed this assault and I understand they have been arrested,” Van Orden’s post stated.

The incident occurred at about 11 a.m. outside the Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, where people were in line to go into the building for the event in the hotel’s grand ballroom, said Melissa Garriga, a CODEPINK spokesperson.

CODEPINK’s statement said Jaghama was “peacefully waiting in line to enter an event” when she was “intentionally bumped into by a bald, white member of Congress while he tried to shove past her.”

The statement said Jaghama did not react to the incident, but was accused of assault by a Texas State police officer who was at the scene and who took her into custody. Milwaukee Police subsequently arrived and made the arrest.

CODEPINK made a post on X about the incident with a video made on the scene, apparently just after the incident and while some other people were still in line to enter the hotel. CODEPINK published the post at 3:27 p.m. Tuesday.

In the video, Jaghama says of Van Orden, “He cut me in line, so I stood in front of him, because I was first.”

In a video on CODEPINK’s website, one of the group’s members says that Van Orden “as soon as he ran into her said, ‘You are assaulting a member of Congress.’”

CODEPINK’s statement described Jaghama as “visibly Palestinian.” The statement said two other CODEPINK staff members ahead of Jaghama had gone into the building “without any issues, raising concerns of racial profiling.”

Garriga said Jaghama was taken to the Milwaukee Police Department District 3 station after her arrest. “We do not know what the charges are as of now,” Garriga told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email early Tuesday evening.

Van Orden’s post on X about the incident was time-stamped at 5:26 p.m.

In his post, Van Orden wrote, “This appears to be an incident of political violence and I will never tolerate this. Regardless of the severity of the violence, political violence is political violence.”

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

It was nearly two hours into a long afternoon rally Sunday when Rev. Dr. Kevin Shaw took the podium in a packed auditorium on Milwaukee’s Northeast Side.

It was not, he reminded the audience, a church service, but from his cadences, the message might have been from a pulpit.

“We must understand that democracy is in danger,” Shaw said, his voice rising. “That’s why we’re here tonight — to protect our democracy, to reject white Christian nationalism and to build the beloved community.”

He spoke of people targeted by racism, because of their sexual orientation, or because they are not Christian — all of whom “constantly have to prove that they belong here in America.”

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd.

“But the God that I believe in, the Jesus in the text that I’m familiar with, took time for those who were outcasts, took time with those who were considered to not be worthy of God’s grace.”

Sunday’s rally came on the eve of the Republican National Convention set to nominate former President Donald Trump as, once again, the GOP candidate for that office.

In response, the cross-section of faith leaders who gathered on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus Sunday disavowed the strain of religion that, they charged, animates Trump’s candidacy. The policies he pursued in his previous term and the agenda he has embraced on the stump, speakers said, are anchored in white Christian nationalism.

Sunday’s rally was sponsored by the Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope — MICAH, an interfaith social activism organization founded 36 years ago. Shaw is MICAH’s president. He is also the pastor of St. Matthew C.M.E. Church in Milwaukee.

The group’s campaign against white Christian nationalism, launched in August 2023, is called “We All Belong.”

In an interview a few days before Sunday’s rally, Shaw said white Christian nationalism has been at the root of political trends ranging from making voting more difficult to pushing to remove books that report frankly about U.S. history and the treatment of Black enslaved people or the harm done to Native Americans.

“White Christian nationalism teaches exclusion and control,” Shaw said. “Regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, we all belong. We are all part of democracy.”

Jim Wallis, a writer and longtime social justice activist driven by his Christian faith, came to Milwaukee for Sunday’s rally. Wallis has written a book, “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.”

At a press conference before the rally, Wallis noted that there will be people proclaiming their faith on the podium at the Republican convention.

“The use of religion to promote fear and hate and violence is blasphemy,” Wallis said. “It’s time to name it and say it, and time to debate it.”

White Christian nationalism refers to a collection of beliefs about American history and American society that critics argue contradict historical truth.

One belief is that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that privileging Christian belief systems and practicing Christians over other beliefs and their adherents is justified. That is false, said another speaker at Sunday’s rally, Amanda Tyler, lead organizer of Christians Against Christian Nationalism.

Tyler is also the executive director of the Baptist Joint Council for Religious Liberty, made up of several Baptist denominations that advocate for strong church-state separation.

“The lie of white Christian nationalism also contradicts the history and the constitutional text,” said Tyler, author of an upcoming book on combating white Christian nationalism. “The founders of the United States, as imperfect as they were, made a deliberate choice to form a secular government. In so doing they make a deliberate choice to break with the tradition that established religion by the government.”

Christian nationalism “is a gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus, who was always on the side of the marginalized and the oppressed,” Tyler added.

She distinguished patriotism — love of country — from nationalism, an allegiance that “demands supremacy over all other allegiances, including to Jesus.”

Tyler described the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by supporters of Donald Trump as rooted in white Christian nationalist thinking.

Tyler said flags embraced by white Christian nationalists were flown in the Capitol by some of the people involved in the attack, which was aimed at preventing the certification of Joe Biden as the next president after Biden defeated then-President Trump in the 2020 election. Tyler testified before the congressional select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack.

Several speakers made note of a Trump rally in Pennsylvania Saturday at which a man firing an assault-style weapon wounded the former president and two people, including the shooter, were killed.

“Violence is never justified and political violence is abhorrent and anti-democratic,” Tyler said.

“Every time there’s an act of violence, nearby or far away, we are traumatized,” said Rev. Marilyn Miller, the rally emcee.

Another rally speaker, Janan Najeeb, president of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition and the religious caucus chair for MICAH, contrasted the society that white Christian nationalists envision with the Beloved Community — an ideal named by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the MICAH campaign also embraces.

“The Beloved Community is a society in which caring and compassion drive political policies, and support the worldwide elimination of poverty, hunger, bigotry and prejudice,” Najeeb said. “The Beloved Community upholds intrinsic worth and value of people. It is a community where prejudice, cruelty and greed are replaced with a spirit of friendship and goodwill for all. The Beloved Community is inclusive. It is diverse and welcoming and embodies the best of America’s ideals.”

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Donald Trump’s election interference case, granting U.S. presidents broad immunity from criminal charges, prompted outrage from pro-democracy activists in Wisconsin Monday.

In the 6-3 opinion, the Court ruled that U.S. presidents enjoy full immunity from criminal charges for their official “core constitutional” acts, and sent back to lower courts a federal case against President Donald Trump on charges connected with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Today the U.S. Supreme Court has made it loud and clear that there are certain people within the U.S. — the wealthy, the well-connected, the very powerful — that get to live above the law,” said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, at a news conference held outside the federal courthouse in Madison Monday afternoon.

“It’s bizarre that because he’s president — well, he was president — that he gets to enjoy certain privileges, certain rights, that everyday folks like us don’t get to enjoy,” Ramos said.

The Court decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, said that a president has no immunity for unofficial acts. But it sent back to the trial court the question of whether Trump’s alleged conduct to spread false information about the 2020 election and conspiring to overturn the results was an unofficial act or qualified as official presidential action.

Trump is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct, an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. Trump was indicted in August 2023 on allegations that he knowingly spread falsehoods to his supporters, plotted with co-conspirators to overturn election results in seven states and eventually worked his base into a frenzy that culminated in the violent attack on the Capitol the day Congress was to certify electoral votes.

In response to the ruling, a coalition of groups, including the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the public interest law firm Law Forward held press conferences in front of the federal courthouses in Milwaukee and Madison to castigate the decision.

“The U.S. Supreme Court ought to be ashamed of itself — how they handled this case and how they rendered this decision today,” Ramos said. “The court can try and paint this however they want to legally, but the fact is, it chose to play partisan politics instead of doing their job and doing the right thing.”

Speakers at the events were flanked by supporters from SEIU and other groups, including a half-dozen who wore mock judicial robes and cloth banana tops that framed their faces.

“I thought we lived in a republic, but apparently we live in a banana republic,” Ramos said.

The six bananas wore placards around their necks with the last names of the six justices who concurred in the Roberts opinion. “All engineered delays in this case [that] helped Trump avoid a jury verdict in his criminal conspiracy to overturn the last election before the American people can vote in the next one,” Ramos said.

The Court’s ruling Monday came more than four months after the justices accepted the appeal of a lower court ruling denying Trump immunity from criminal charges for his actions in attempting to thwart the transfer of power to Joe Biden, who won the 2020 election.

Ramos contrasted that delay with the court’s faster action on other cases, including its ruling that overturned a Colorado decision blocking Trump from that state’s ballot for “insurrection.”

“Those justices have ensured irreconcilable showdown in the fall between the ordinary operations of the criminal justice system, which would require Trump’s speedy pretrial and trial proceedings, and the ordinary functioning of the presidential election system in which both nominees are free to campaign,” Ramos said.

“Here in America, we hold sacred, the core values of democracy: that our leaders, whether elected or appointed, must respect our will and govern in our interest, not seize power, commit crimes and rule over us,” said Jeff Mandell, cofounder and general counsel of Law Forward. “The concept of absolute immunity for anyone is incompatible with government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Mandell called Monday’s ruling “disappointing, but not surprising.” He ticked off a series of decisions, including canceling the national right to abortion two years ago and, last week, shifting critical decisions about protecting health and safety from federal agencies to the courts.

“Today’s decision underscores the importance of holding accountable those who enabled Trump’s efforts to seek to overturn the will of the people and to deter those who might seek to do so again in a future election,” Mandell said. “The efforts to hold Trump’s co-conspirators, including those who designed and implemented the fake electoral scheme that began in Wisconsin and metastasized all across the country, are more vital now than ever.”

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. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.