Ruth Conniff, Wisconsin Examiner

False claims of voter fraud and bullying of election officials is at an all-time high, Becker said during a Zoom press conference with reporters around the country.

CEIR’s election worker Legal Defense Network is receiving as many calls about threats and harassment now as it did just after it was created in September 2021, he added. “That tells you how bad it’s been.”

While Becker’s focus is nationwide, he expressed particular concern about the Wisconsin Senate’s recent vote to remove the state’s election administrator, Meagan Wolfe, from office. In 2021, Becker joined a bipartisan group of more than 50 election officials around the country on a letter of support for Wolfe to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

“It does seem as if she’s being punished for having done a remarkably good job in an election with very narrow margins because some people are unhappy with the result,” Becker said Tuesday.

On Thursday, GOP legislators brought forward a resolution to impeach her.

The scapegoating of Wolfe, and the state Senate vote to fire her last week after a committee hearing featuring election deniers airing a barrage of discredited theories, are symptoms of a growing threat to democracy in the United States, Becker suggested.

He warned about the potential for political violence instigated by deniers’ false claims.

“Imagine if instead of just one date in one place on Jan. 6, disinformation leads people who’ve been deluded … to attack election offices, vote counting centers, certification meetings, electors meetings?”

Becker praised the highly professional election workers in Wisconsin in the last presidential election: “I cannot stress enough how well Wisconsin election officials performed with one of the highest turnouts in the country … in the middle of a global pandemic where the margin was just over 20,000 votes. It is one of the great achievements of the American democratic process we’ve ever seen, and Wisconsin’s the epitome of it, and instead of being congratulated, they’re being attacked.”

Becker also lauded former Republican state Sen. Kathy Bernier, who was once an elections clerk herself and now chairs the state chapter of Keep Our Republic, which has been trying to tamp down election conspiracism, for having the courage to stand up to election deniers and push back on false narratives.

A lot is at stake, and Republican state officials who know better need to stop indulging wacky conspiracies and undermining voter confidence — and, in a ridiculously circular argument, claiming that there needs to be more exploration of discredited theories and more pressure on election workers because of the lack of voter confidence that they themselves are creating by indulging this stuff.

At the Tuesday press conference, Becker responded to a reporter’s question about claims made by conspiracy theorist Peter Bernegger, who was involved in Michael Gableman’s expensive, failed investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and who, at the recent Senate hearing, called for Meagan Wolfe’s arrest. Bernegger also testified that the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization with dozens of member states that use of the system to learn when voters move or die, is a plot to give its employees across the country access to sensitive voter information.

Becker laughed in disbelief.

“I already said ERIC doesn’t have Social Security numbers. ERIC doesn’t have driver’s license numbers. ERIC doesn’t have birth dates,” he explained. He called Bernegger’s discredited claims “another case of whack-a-mole that is not worthy of discussion by people who are not qualified to analyze these kinds of things and don’t understand the first thing about how elections are run in the United States. “

This is not just partisan gamesmanship. As Becker said, “We’ve seen the potential for political violence in a state like Wisconsin.”

People like Bernegger and Douglas Frank, the “Johnny Appleseed of election fraud” whose podcasts have gained a following in Wisconsin, are stoking violent insurrection.

“I’m hopeful that there will be an effort by leaders in the state of both parties to speak the truth, to set the rules in advance as was done in 2020, and abide by those rules even if your candidate loses,” Becker said of the looming 2024 election in Wisconsin.

If his hopes don’t pan out, and Republican officials don’t consider the costs of flirting with conspiracy theorists and demagogues, we are headed into a very scary time.

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Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

Wisconsin Republicans’ preferred candidate just took a beating in a much-watched state Supreme Court race, prompting soul searching at both the state and the national levels about how the GOP lost touch with voters, whether the suburban women they depend on to win elections are enjoying our state’s return to nineteenth century abortion rules, and what lessons can be learned ahead of Election Day 2024.

So what do the Republican leaders of the Legislature’s powerful budget committee do this week, as they take up the most significant task of the legislative session? In a hasty hearing that was over in time for lunch, they eliminated 545 provisions in Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget on Tuesday in a single, straight party-line vote. Among the hundreds of items they tossed in the trash without bothering to discuss them were proposals that have massive public support.

These include:

Access to federal Medicaid coverage for 89,700 uninsured residents, at a cost savings to the state of $1.6 billion (supported by 70% of Wisconsinites)

A paid sick leave program for businesses with at least 50 workers, paid for through payroll contributions from both workers and employers. A poll of 15 states including Wisconsin found broad support for the plan across party lines, with 69% of respondents saying they would support paid leave even if they had to pay more taxes to sustain it.

A 10% income tax cut for middle- and low-income Wisconsinites.

A provision to allow Wisconsin’s 70,000 undocumented workers, including those who now perform more than half of the work on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, to once again get driver’s licenses, increasing road safety and saving state residents $16 million in auto insurance premiums alone.

Universal background checks for gun purchases, which are supported by 79% of Wisconsinites

Extreme risk protection orders, to allow judges to take guns away from people who pose an immediate threat to others, which has 81% support.

Legalizing marijuana, bringing Wisconsin into line with our neighboring states and generating $56.5 in new state revenue (69% support)

As Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback remarked tartly, “If I were a Republican Party that had lost 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, I would simply not reject wildly popular policies supported by a majority of the state.”

What are the Republicans up to with their public display of disdain for the things a majority of voters care about?

According to GOP leaders, some of the most popular measures in Evers’ budget plan are “nonfiscal” items that do not belong in the state budget and deserve more debate and discussion as separate bills. But don’t hold your breath for stand-alone bills on popular gun violence measures, for example. As Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Republicans have never taken gun violence seriously in this state, so no one should be surprised that they are removing this list of extremely popular items as quickly as possible because they are afraid to have a debate about them.”

Instead of discussing Evers’ plan to allocate the historic $7 billion state budget surplus to priorities that received an outpouring of support in public hearings around the state, the Republicans are zeroing out the budget and going back to Square One. They will work from the last budget document, ignore the governor’s input, and start making some sort of plan that they have yet to articulate.

And in this, too, they are bucking not just Evers but the large majority of voters who say they want politicians to work collaboratively across the aisle to find solutions and pass legislation.

We’ve seen all of this before. In the last budget cycle, Republicans, treating Evers’ election as some sort of aberration they could freely ignore, summarily threw away his budget proposal, crafted with the input of citizens all over the state in budget listening sessions, and went “back to the base.”

Evers outsmarted them and line-item vetoed some extra money back into schools. Then he went on the road and celebrated the tax cuts in the budget, leaving Republicans sputtering that the tax cuts were their idea and how dare the governor take the credit?!

And that brings us back to the depressingly intractable situation we’re in today. Democrats complain that the Republicans have left them out of the budget process altogether. Republicans grandstand about throwing out Evers’ plan while producing nothing of their own. Now we’re all supposed to wait for them to come up with their own ideas which, they say, might possibly overlap with Evers’, but anything they’ve got in common will be purely coincidental since they deserve all the credit for their own ideas and would have us believe they didn’t even read those 545 budget items they eliminated in a single vote.

This is not how government is supposed to work.

Republican lawmakers have completely forgotten that their job is to hammer out proposals through debate and discussion with the other side; not grandstand and refuse to compromise so later they can hog all the credit.

They’ve been living in a gerrymandered state for so long they’ve forgotten what it was like to have to talk to a broad cross-section of voters about how to make progress on our common problems and achieve our common goals.

Now, sitting on top of a $7 billion surplus, all they can do is yell “No!” and refuse to fund popular initiatives just because the governor proposed them. The good news is that, whether or not they care to learn the lessons of their recent drubbing in the state Supreme Court race, the results are going to dynamite state Republicans out of their entrenched position.

There is likely to be a case on our rigged maps as soon as Janet Protasiewicz is seated in August. And if advocates achieve their goal of getting Wisconsin a new, fairer map, Republicans are going to have to start listening to voters — not just catering to the base in their carefully gerrymandered districts.

That’s going to change things for all of us, whether they’re ready for it or not.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

Losing the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by a whopping 11-point margin was a big blow to Republicans, prompting a round of soul-searching and recriminations. The Wall Street Journal called it a “five alarm” warning that the party is losing its grip on the Midwest and could face stiff headwinds in the 2024 presidential election. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker told Fox News that the defeat of Daniel Kelly — whom Walker himself had appointed for a short stint on the state’s highest court — is a sign that conservatives must redouble their efforts to fight liberal indoctrination in the classroom and on university campuses to win over younger voters (coincidentally, that’s the very effort Walker is paid to lead at the Young America’s Foundation).

Some conservative advocates argue that the race proves that Republicans need to be even more vocal about their anti-abortion views. Others point to softening support among suburban women and suggest dumping Trump and moving away from the hard right is the path to success.

Regardless, in the most gerrymandered state in the nation, you can bet the GOP is not going to give up power easily.

There’s been a lot of speculation that Republicans could use their new supermajority in the state Senate — the one bright spot for the GOP after an otherwise miserable election night — to impeach newly elected Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz. But that’s unlikely since A. Protasiewicz hasn’t been seated and hasn’t even arguably done anything impeachable yet and B. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers could appoint her replacement (just like Walker appointed Kelly to fill an empty seat), so the net result would not advance the conservative cause.

Losing its lock on power is an existential crisis for a party that has been able to run the table, even while losing statewide elections.

Republican legislators and their allies can no longer turn to a conservative majority on the state’s highest court to help them seize powers from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as they did after he won in 2018. They won’t be able to rely on the court to stick by the “least change” doctrine that conveniently ratified their gerrymandered maps, locking in their control of the Legislature after they changed everything to draw themselves into power. And they won’t be able to count on the conservative majority that very nearly overturned the legitimate vote for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In a letter to supporters, Rick Esenberg, founder, president and general counsel of the rightwing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which is continually bringing cases to the state Supreme Court on behalf of the Republican Legislature, reacted to the news about the new liberal majority by calling for an all-out war against “the progressive left” that now hold the White House, the governor’s mansion and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. “The left has already begun bragging of how they will ‘undo’ Act 10, the congressional district maps, and every other hard-fought win that we achieved in the first place,” Esenberg wrote. “They will start in Wisconsin and go on from here. We cannot let them succeed.”

What choice do conservatives have?

They can take the long and arduous route Walker recommends, trying to persuade more college students that abortion shouldn’t be a right and that climate change isn’t real. Or they can try a more expedient route, fighting like hell to hold onto gerrymandered maps so they can remain in power.

Rather than trying to impeach Protasiewicz, my bet is that Republicans press the current conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, perhaps in response to a request for original action from WILL, to make a ruling ratifying the existing gerrymandered map. They might also suddenly get interested in ethics rules. After refusing for years to recuse themselves from cases involving their own campaign contributors, they could pass new rules based on their argument that Protasiewicz, having expressed her support for abortion rights and her belief that Wisconsin’s voting map is “rigged,” must therefore recuse herself from cases involving gerrymandering and abortion.

That won’t get them very far, though, since a new liberal majority can undo the kinds of last-minute deck-stacking efforts the Legislature successfully executed against Evers in the lame duck session.

At some point, cheating isn’t enough. Having lost the high court, Republicans are facing a perilous moment.

Which brings us back to all those Republican politicos’ pleas to the party to figure out how to do a better job appealing to voters.

When the Republicans talk about losing “everything we’ve worked for” with the change on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, they’re referring mainly to the changes Walker set in motion with his union-busting Act 10, as well as more than a decade of deep cuts to education funding and deregulation of polluting industries.

The tangible results of Walker’s “divide and conquer” politics are visible everywhere now.

That bitter legacy was most eloquently described by former UW chancellor John Wiley in a 2015 essay for Madison Magazine in which he described Wisconsin’s decline since he first arrived here four decades ago as a graduate student after living in Indiana and Tennessee. Wiley paints a picture of Wisconsin the way it used to be, when progressive-era investments in infrastructure and a small-d democratic ethos created a state with perfectly maintained highways, tidy farms, city streets and parks free of trash and a well educated workforce. After spending 40 years at the university, Wiley sadly observed, “almost everything that once made Wisconsin seem like a promised land is being systematically stripped away and discarded. That process has been tragically accelerated under Governor Scott Walker.”

Business interests that have been able to buy seats on the Wisconsin Supreme Court “really do want us to become a third-world state, and they are winning,” Wiley wrote.

Investments in public schools and our great university have been slashed, tuition is no longer affordable for families of modest means, including people like Wiley’s parents. Meanwhile, the median family income in Wisconsin has declined, and with the attack on unions, the route to the middle class has been further barricaded. There is a rundown quality to our state, a meanness exacerbated by “divide and conquer” political rhetoric, and a deep inequality. We are no longer that clean, optimistic land of opportunity that attracted Wiley.

That’s the legacy Walker and his allies worked so hard for. And now it’s threatened, because their vision won’t be protected from voters who don’t like it.

Abortion and gerrymandering were the big topics in the Supreme Court election (along with a big dose of lurid Republican ads about violent crime). Protasiewicz calculated, correctly, that a majority of voters did not agree that conservative triumphs have been good for the state. She has also been an opponent of Walker’s Act 10, having grown up in a union household and seeing what a difference pro-worker policies made for her own family.

If Protasiewicz and her colleagues are able to rule on fair maps, legislators who play only to their hard-right base could suddenly face a referendum on the whole Walker legacy, the damage it has done and what kind of a state we really want to live in. No wonder they’re so dismayed.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

On Tuesday, the North Carolina Supreme Court reheard arguments in a redistricting case that has been the focus of much national attention. The new conservative majority on the court is reconsidering a recent decision to throw out GOP lawmakers’ gerrymandered voting maps — a decision that had already made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and could have sweeping implications. Especially here in Wisconsin, North Carolina’s struggle over its heavily gerrymandered voting maps is important.

We all know the April 4 election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court could change the balance of power on that body. If a new liberal majority takes over, voting rights advocates intend to bring a challenge to Wisconsin’s heavily gerrymandered voting maps, just as advocates did in North Carolina.

But in that state, the balance of power just tilted the other way — from a Democratic to a Republican majority on the court (unlike the nominally nonpartisan court in Wisconsin, North Carolina justices have declared party affiliations). On Tuesday, the new majority showed every sign it is prepared to reverse the decision that threw out Republicans’ gerrymandered maps less than three months ago.

In the rare rehearing, the court sped through oral arguments during which a lawyer for Republican legislators claimed that the court had overstepped its authority by taking away the legislature’s power to draw the voting maps.

“Just because it’s not fair doesn’t mean this body can do anything about it,” Phillip Stratch, an attorney for the Republicans argued, adding, “some things are beyond the power of this court. … sometimes it has to be left up to the people.”

But how can “the people” decide anything if their elected representatives have deliberately disempowered them through gerrymandering, Democratic Justice Anita Earls asked. Earls pointed to expert testimony on the effects of the North Carolina maps, “that they were among the most extreme partisan gerrymanders possible” and favored Republican candidates even in elections where Democrats got more votes, thus canceling the ability of Democratic voters to make their voices heard.

It all sounds very familiar here in a state that has, according to a federal judge, one of the most gerrymandered voting maps in the country, locking in big Republican majorities in the Legislature even when Democrats win statewide.

State courts have been newly empowered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which destroyed hopes of a federal remedy for partisan gerrymandering when it held that federal courts do not have the authority to review disputes involving political gerrymandering — unlike cases involving racial discrimination.

In North Carolina, the Republicans argued on Tuesday that the state court should take the same view that the U.S. Supreme Court took in Rucho and find that, as Stratch put it, there is no language about “fair districts” in the U.S. Constitution and there is also nothing about partisanship or fair maps in the state constitution.

In Wisconsin, advocates are optimistic they can make the case that the state constitution does, in fact, have a lot to say about fair maps.

“We believe gerrymandering is one of the greatest threats to our democracy,” says Dan Lenz, staff counsel for the nonprofit, progressive law firm Law Forward.

Advocates could draw on various sections of the Wisconsin Constitution to support a challenge, including sections covering equal protection and apportionment.

Gerrymandering hurts the citizens in our state not just by squelching their voices, but by creating a system where the government ignores the issues they care about, Lenz says. “The function of gerrymandering is to stop what people care about from becoming law.”

The whole reason politics has become so poisonously partisan, he adds, is that “politicians are not accountable in free and fair elections.” With so few competitive districts, all legislators care about are primary challenges — propelling them deeper and deeper toward one side, and away from bipartisan compromise.

That toxic, unproductive environment is just as much a problem as the rank unfairness of our gerrymandered map.

If the Wisconsin Supreme Court, under a new, 4-3 liberal majority, did throw out the state Legislature’s gerrymandered maps, there are various ways new maps might be developed.

The court could ask the petitioners who bring a lawsuit — nonprofit groups, elected officials, and/or voters who argue that they have been disenfranchised by extreme gerrymandering — to submit maps, as they did in the most recent round of arguments. They could appoint outside experts or special masters to come up with a new map. Or they could send the map back to the Legislature with the instruction to try again.

The timeline depends on how the whole process unfolds. But Lenz says he expects that, if there’s a change in the makeup of the court, a suit will be filed in August and a new map could be chosen by March — in time for the 2024 elections.

The good news, for now, is that the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be hanging back from a potentially game-changing decision in the North Carolina redistricting case. In the federal version of that case, a challenge based on the so-called “independent state legislature” theory argues that state courts should have no jurisdiction at all over voting maps; instead, state legislators should have unchecked power to draw their own districts.

As messy and maddening as this week’s tangle of arguments over gerrymandering have been in North Carolina, and as frustrating as our rigged voting system is in Wisconsin, at least for now, the U.S. Supreme Court does not seem to be on the brink of dealing a death blow to democracy by handing total power to hyperpartisan, gerrymandered legislatures.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

In Wisconsin, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University and the conservative, Christian academy always seemed like strange bedfellows. I covered their partnership back in a December 2021 Examiner story exploring how the tribal college — which runs one other charter school emphasizing Ojibwe language and culture — came to authorize an academy whose curriculum centers the greatness of Western civilization and soft-pedals slavery and the genocide of Native American people.

While it received 3% of the taxpayer funds that followed each student to the school under its contract, the tribal college took a laissez faire attitude toward the actual running of the school, which was located at the other end of the state and did not serve any Lac Courte Oreilles children.

But Arnn’s inflammatory comments, which the Examiner reported on Oct. 3, disrupted the easy-going relationship between the school and the tribal college, which issued its denunciation on Oct. 4. Despite the strong language in the tribal college’s statement, Arnn’s secretly recorded comments actually didn’t have much to do with race. Instead, they focused on teachers, whom Arnn said are “trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country.” But a flurry of reporting on Arnn and Hillsdale around the same time also cited the Hillsdale K-12 curriculum’s criticism of the civil rights movement and its “emphasis on the history and traditions of American citizens as the inheritors of Western civilization,” as the Lake Country Classical Academy website puts it.

Hillsdale’s explicitly political project is no secret. Arnn was appointed by Trump to lead the 1776 Commission, created to promote a positive vision of America, in what Politico called “a direct challenge to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which explored how racism and inequality shaped the founding of the country.”

A recent Facebook ad hawking Betsy Ross flags as a fundraiser for Hillsdale College quotes the Declaration of Independence and states, “Throughout most of our nation’s history, Americans learned about and revered these ideas. Sadly, because of the Left’s hijacking of history education in so many of our schools, this is no longer true.”

If the Lac Courte Oreilles is ending its relationship with a Hillsdale charter school because of such provocative political statements, why is the UW System now considering becoming a Hillsdale charter authorizer in Wisconsin?

The UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity is reviewing another proposed Hillsdale charter school, the North Shore Classical Academy. The school’s founder was part of a failed recall effort to unseat four school board members in Mequon-Thiensville, a high-achieving, mostly white district in the suburbs of Milwaukee, based in part on claims that the schools were teaching “critical race theory.”

On Oct. 17, at a community meeting to gather public input on the school, the director of the OEO, Vanessa Moran, said the academy has already passed the first phase of a five-phase process for approval by UW System. During the public meeting in Mequon, Jenni Hofschulte, a member of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, says she spoke with Moran, who praised the academy and also had positive things to say about Lake County Classical Academy. Acknowledging that the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University is cutting ties with Lake Country, Moran told Hofshulte she had visited the school and that she felt it was doing great things. While UW System had not yet committed to authorize either Hillsdale school, according to Hofshulte, Moran said she was excited about the prospect that the two Hillsdale charter schools could form a “professional community.”

Moran did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment on the matter. But according to a UW System public information officer, Lake Country Classical Academy has not yet applied for authorization through the UW System.

For now, Wisconsin has one Hillsdale charter school whose authorizer has threatened to leave unless it meets a series of demands that include dropping its affiliation with Hillsdale and sending all of its staff and board members to Ojibwe/indigenous cultural sensitivity training — conditions it seems unlikely the school will meet.

And then there’s the North Shore Classical Academy, which, curiously, describes itself on its website as “the first in the state of Wisconsin to be a Hillsdale Curriculum School” (Lake Country Classical Academy’s website states that it is a “Hillsdale College Member School” and promotes its status as a “licensed user of the Hillsdale K-12 curriculum.”)

North Shore’s founder, Cheryl Rebholz, in addition to running in the recall election for the Mequon-Thiensville school district last fall, is a former school board member and the owner of a “boutique shooting range” in Mequon, according to a video produced by the right-wing Badger Institute. The video, titled “An Epidemic of Decline,” features Rebholz describing her disillusionment with the Mequon school district and her decision to launch the new charter school because of a breakdown in discipline and the way “politics” has invaded public school classrooms. “I don’t care what your politics are, they stop at the threshold. It is an epidemic of decline, and we need to restore it,” she says.

The video, which opens with a statement about independent charter schools and private voucher schools receiving “thousands less per student” than public schools, ends with Rebholz saying emphatically, “I want the same amount of money a public schooler gets in-district! That money should follow the child, period.”

This statement sums up the debate in Wisconsin and across the country about the privatization of public schools. Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels promised during his campaign that he would create a universal school choice system in Wisconsin, removing all enrollment and income limits on vouchers.

One private school parent who attended the public meeting on the North Shore Classical Academy voiced opposition to the movement toward unlimited taxpayer funding for what is essentially a publicly funded system of private schools. “How many of these can we afford?” asked Mequon resident Beth Bauer. “Public school is for the public, not for every individual parent. … If you want private school, we have plenty of them around here.”

The UW System’s involvement in the expansion of charter schools like Hillsdale adds fuel to the fire that is consuming Wisconsin’s public education system.

The Office of Educational Opportunity was created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 2015, and its director is appointed by the UW System president.

The whole point of the office is to give charter schools that don’t get a green light from local school boards another shot at setting up shop, drawing money out of local school districts without local citizen input.

“Circumventing local school boards diminishes local control, thwarts transparency and damages democracy,” says Hofshulte.

If the OEO decides to become a Hillsdale authorizer, it will also mean the UW System is making Wisconsin taxpayers pay to support the right-wing, anti-public-school movement.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

Former Wisconsin Republican Congressman Reid Ribble joined a panel on Tuesday hosted by the Defend Democracy Project to discuss the House Jan. 6 Select Committee hearings and how they are affecting voters’ attitudes in Wisconsin.

Ribble is one of a handful of Republicans nationwide who have been outspoken critics of former President Donald Trump — although Ribble tweeted his congratulations to Trump’s pick for Wisconsin governor, Tim Michels, after Michels won the Republican primary last week.

Congratulations to @michelsforgov on his win yesterday. Also @RebeccaforReal you worked hard for years to win this race and it just didn’t work out. Hold your head high this morning there is no shame in not winning an election.
— Reid Ribble (@RepRibble) August 10, 2022

“The seeds of Jan. 6 were planted very, very early on,” Ribble said during the panel discussion. He blamed the Capitol attack on Republicans who echoed Donald Trump for months, creating a steady drum beat with their comments about “how the election was stolen.”

Still, Ribble said he was surprised and horrified by the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. “That a group of American citizens could believe that they could break in, they could do violence to the Capitol building, they could do vandalism to the Capitol building that could disrupt the functioning of the U.S. Congress, all based on a lie that the election had been stolen, was shocking to me.”

Ribble said he was impressed by the work of the Jan. 6 committee. He would have preferred to see a bipartisan investigation led by experts from outside Congress, but “this was a last resort because of obstruction of Republican members in Congress to not get to the truth. They didn’t want to see that.”

“Now the truth is coming out,” Ribble said.

“I was very worried about the politicization of the committee itself, and that we would just have this political farce going on,” he added. “The problem that the right has with that argument today is virtually all the witnesses that we’ve seen so far have been Republicans, so in fact it was partisan and partisan on the Republican side.”

But what effect has that had on Republican voters? In Wisconsin, a closely divided swing state, the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senator who will be on the ballot in November, Michels and Sen. Ron Johnson, are both close Trump allies. Michels won his primary handily against the establishment candidate, former GOP Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who had the endorsement of former Gov. Scott Walker, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“You worked hard for years to win this race and it just didn’t work out,” Ribble tweeted at Kleefisch after the primary. “Hold your head high this morning there is no shame in not winning an election.”

For Republicans generally, the results of Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary show that getting out of the shadow of Donald Trump, as Ribble and his fellow anti-Trump Republicans are urging, is no easy task.

During Tuesday’s Defend Democracy Project panel, Jim Williams of Public Policy Polling shared the results of an Aug. 15 survey of 546 Wisconsin voters that gave a snapshot of how public opinion has shifted during the Jan. 6 committee hearings.

The poll found that a majority of Wisconsin voters were paying attention to the hearings and expressed support for the investigation, with 60% saying it is important to protect democracy. Independents showed a consistently high level of concern about the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations, with 57% saying they are concerned about Sen. Johnson having played an active role in Trump’s scheme to overturn the election, and now calling for Wisconsin Republicans to consolidate power over election administration in the state.

But among Trump voters only 9% supported the investigation, compared with 95% of Biden voters. More than half of Trump voters still said they found it at least somewhat concerning that Trump spread voter fraud misinformation. But when asked specifically about Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the election, only 6% of Trump voters said they had very serious concerns and another 6% said they had somewhat serious concerns.

Among voters who describe themselves as independents, 54% said Trump and his team who took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection should be criminally prosecuted.

In a closely divided swing state, “you start talking about 55 to 60% of people, that’s pretty noteworthy,” said moderator Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic political consultant in Wisconsin who is currently working with the nonpartisan Defend Democracy Project.

Trump’s attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is unprecedented in American history, said Praveen Fernandes, vice president at the Constitutional Accountability Center. “That hasn’t even happened since the Civil War; in the Civil War, we had a peaceful transition of power. It is stunning,” he added.

During eight heavily publicized Congressional hearings, the committee laid out evidence that suggests that former President Trump and his associates engaged in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of an election they knew Trump had lost. Republican witnesses in hearing after hearing described Trump’s pressure campaign on state and federal officials, as he tried to get them to change the results. In several hearings, White House staffers described how Trump and his allies coordinated with violent extremists and directed an armed mob towards the Capitol. The final hearing focused on how Trump refused to intervene for 187 minutes as the violence at the Capitol was unfolding.

As dramatic as they were, the Jan. 6 hearings are “having some effect, but I think it’s relatively small from a voting standpoint,” Ribble said.

The Public Policy Polling data backed that up, he said, showing the state is about evenly divided on the hearings, with a little more than half of voters saying they are quite concerned about the Jan. 6 revelations.

But Williams of Public Policy Polling pointed to the difference between the more than 90% of Democrats who say they are very concerned about Jan. 6 and the 70 to 75% of Republicans, who say they are not very concerned. Almost no one on the Democratic side is unsure what they think, Williams said. On the Republican side that’s not the case. “You’re starting to see a 20 to 25% segment of Republican voters who have concerns about this and are saying so,” Williams said. “It begs the question, you know, how much it’s weighing on their mind.”

Ribble doesn’t see the needle moving very much on his side. “When I talk with conservatives, those in that 15 to 20% that were very concerned about what happened on Jan. 6, they are more concerned about inflation. They are more concerned about economics. And so even though they are concerned about what happened on Jan. 6, even though they say they are concerned about election integrity related issues, they are more concerned about other things that are right in their pocketbooks,” he said.

“I’m not 100% convinced that this rises to the level to convince many Republicans to support an independent or a Democratic candidate or more progressive candidate that might be opposed to them on all these other issues,” he added.

Ribble, who has consistently tried to debunk election conspiracies in his social media posts, closed and opened the panel discussion with his main point: that local election workers are “the real heroes.”

“More than anything, we must trust the American people working in those polls, mostly senior citizens who are volunteering — tens of thousands of them — to donate their time to see that their precinct had a free and fair election,” he said. “Let’s trust our neighbor and put this nonsense behind us.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

NOW WATCH: Fox News’ Laura Ingraham admits 'exhausted' Americans may finally be done with Trump

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Tim Michels, the construction company owner and Donald Trump’s favorite Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, has been having a hard time squaring his past and present views on immigration. Michels is taking fire from his main GOP rival after Dan Bice reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that a group led by Michels fought against the get-tough approach to undocumented immigrants he now champions.

Michels has made cracking down on the people he calls “illegals” a centerpiece of his campaign. He brags in his TV ads about building a prototype for former President Donald Trump’s border wall. And he touts his “blueprint to stop illegal immigration,” including “no drivers’ licenses, no benefits, and no tuition.”

But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published documents showing that when Michels was president of the board of the Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association during the 2007-2008 legislative session, the group lobbied against a bill that would have prevented companies that hire undocumented workers from receiving government contracts, tax breaks or loans.

Michels’ campaign responded by saying he didn’t know about his group’s lobbying on the bill, which was ultimately killed.

Michels’ opponent, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, jumped on that claim, putting out a statement saying Michels “won’t take responsibility” for the conflict.

But Michels’ troubles expose a more significant problem with Republicans’ position on immigration.

Across the United States, employers in the construction industry as well as food service, hospitality and especially agriculture are heavily dependent on undocumented immigrant labor. All the racist immigrant-bashing you hear from Republican candidates like Michels is not just mean-spirited, it’s hypocritical. The Wisconsin road builders whom Michels led know they rely on undocumented immigrants. That’s why they opposed a bill that would take away lucrative contracts if they employed them.

For my new book, “Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers,” I spent a lot of time with Wisconsin farmers who voted in big numbers for former President Donald Trump, but who also employ undocumented immigrants. By some estimates, undocumented workers, mostly from Mexico, now do 80% of the work on Wisconsin dairy farms. (Because there is no U.S. visa program for year-round, “unskilled” farm work, dairy workers, unlike seasonal farm laborers, are almost all working in the U.S. without documents.)

‘Milked’ by Ruth Conniff | book cover art from The New Press

I traveled to Mexico with a group of farmers who go every year to visit the families of their workers. They expressed a feeling of kinship and pride in the success of the hard-working people from rural Mexico who have spent years laboring on their farms and built homes and businesses back in Mexico with the money they make milking cows.

These workers are carrying the economies of two places on their backs — rural Wisconsin, where they are doing the work that keeps our dairy industry going, and their rural villages in Mexico, where the money they send home rivals petroleum as a share of Mexican GDP, causing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to praise them as “living heroes.”

Most of the Republican farmers I interviewed for my book voted for Trump because they were upset about the North American Free Trade Agreement and other bipartisan policies that have accelerated the “get big or get out” trend that is killing family farms in Wisconsin. Trump’s attacks on Mexicans made them uncomfortable, but they hoped he would shake up a system that for too long has not done enough for rural people.

To their credit, members of the Dairy Business Association have worked with the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera to set up skeleton crews on their farms that allowed their workers to take time off for a Day Without Immigrants rally and lobbying day at the Capitol in Madison. The workers delivered milk bottles to legislators’ offices with the slogan “Got Milk? Not Without Immigrants.” Among the issues they lobbied on that day were the restoration of driver’s licenses — which Republicans in our state Legislature took away from undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin in 2007 — and the defeat of a bill that would turn local law enforcement officers into immigration police.

Lots of Republicans recognize the contributions of immigrants to our economy. As one Trump-voting farmer put it, admiring the way a whole community in Mexico pitched in to help someone build a house, “Small town Mexico, small town U.S.A. — same thing.”

It’s a bad look that Michels, whose group didn’t want to be punished for having undocumented employees, is now running on a promise to make those employees’ lives as miserable as possible.

With the horrifying discovery of 53 migrants who died in an abandoned tractor trailer in Texas while attempting to cross into the United States, it became clearer than ever that we need comprehensive immigration reform and a more humane approach to the people we rely on to do so much of the hard work that makes our country run.

Instead of competing to outdo each other by bashing immigrants, Republicans should listen to the rural Wisconsin voters who know full well what Michels doesn’t want to admit — that our economy is irreversibly dependent on immigrant labor. Instead of talking about putting driver’s licenses and college tuition out of reach for these workers, they should champion a legal visa program that recognizes the longstanding economic reality that the people of rural Wisconsin and rural Mexico are inextricably intertwined.

It’s time to drop the tough-guy posturing and stand behind an honest policy solution.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has been ordered to search for and turn over records relating to the partisan investigation of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin. Vos must also pay statutory fees and attorneys’ costs associated with the case, according to an order issued Friday by Dane County Circuit Court Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn.

“In this public records case, Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos… did not respond to four records requests for six months,” the judge states in her decision. “After the Court ordered Vos to respond, he finally did so. It took him one day.”

“On another occasion, Vos responded to a request for records ‘from November 3, 2020 through the date the search is conducted’ by producing 1,400 pages of unwanted records from August 2020, but none from the requested period,” the decision states.

The court found that Vos had violated Wisconsin’s public records statutes by not producing records “as soon as practicable,” and by failing to respond to a request for a specific time period and instead producing records from a different, unasked-for time period. Furthermore, “based on the undisputed evidence of Vos’ ineffectual records practices, I can draw no reasonable inference except that Vos did not search for records in the first instance,” the judge wrote.

American Oversight, the government watchdog group that requested the records, won its motion for summary judgment against Vos, who must now search for and produce the records within 20 days as well as paying American Oversight’s costs.

Among the records American Oversight is seeking are copies of contracts or other written agreements between the Wisconsin State Assembly and the parties investigating the 2020 election, copies of guidance or policy procedures given to those parties and copies of resumes, bids, proposals, cost estimates and invoices related to the investigation.

The group has also requested copies of internal and external communications between Vos and the Arizona state government and former President Donald Trump, as well as copies of communication “regarding the Assembly’s decision not to pursue a large-scale investigation or review of elections in Wisconsin.”

Vos delayed passing on some of those requests to his staff, the court found. “As a result, Vos admits that responsive records could have been deleted after his office received a request, but before Vos told his employees about that request,” the order states. (Thanks to a loophole in Wisconsin’s records retention law, legislators, unlike other public employees, are permitted to routinely delete records that have not been specifically requested by the public.)

The Court did not agree with American Oversight that Vos’ conduct was “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore deserving of punitive damages, and ruled against that portion of the group’s motion for summary judgment. Instead, the decision scolds Vos for delegating responsibility for fulfilling open records requests to “untrained and unsupervised individuals” in his office, noting that Wisconsin Department of Justice guidance on the state’s open record’s law is very clear that “[r]equests for public records should be given high priority,” and that “10 working days generally is a reasonable time for responding to a simple request for a limited number of easily identifiable records.”

Vos’ office did not respond to a request for comment on the court’s decision.

“The judge’s ruling reaffirms Speaker Vos’ status as a transparency scofflaw,” says Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a group dedicated to open government. “There is nothing so complicated about the responsibility of records custodians under the state’s open records law that it should require multiple judicial rebukes.”

“Vos wears his contempt for the idea that he should be accountable to anyone on his sleeve. It is not a good look,” adds Lueders, who wrote a piece for the Examiner in 2019 about Vos’ poor open records compliance. “The penalties that the Speaker incurred should not be passed on to taxpayers. He should pay them with his own money, since he broke the law of his own accord.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

“And it’s not just federal crimes we’ve heard about,” Eisen added, recapping testimony from Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia about being pressured to falsify election results, as well as Trump advisers’ coordinated push to get phony electoral ballots for Trump from seven states including Wisconsin.

Eisen was joined by three Wisconsinites, State Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), Kyle Johnson, the political director of BLOC (Black Leaders Organizing Communities) and Mel Barnes, an attorney with Law Forward, the nonprofit, progressive law firm that is suing Wisconsin’s fake electors who cast phony electoral ballots for former President Donald Trump.

Underscoring the panel’s message that Wisconsin played a critical role in the battle over democratic elections and the 2020 results, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, over the weekend to celebrate a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that bars the use of drop boxes for voting. Trump called for the nullification of Wisconsin’s 2020 Electoral College votes and ordered Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), to “do something, for once, about this atrocity!”

“I think it’s really important for members of the public in Wisconsin to know we’re not talking about something that’s happening somewhere else, or to other people. This is something that is happening in Wisconsin, specifically,” said panel moderator Joe Zepecki of the Defend Democracy Project. He pointed to Trump’s remarks about the drop box decision as evidence that “this is not over. This is ongoing.”

Tuesday’s hearing will focus on Trump’s connection to a plan to use violence to help overturn the 20202 election results. And the violent white nationalist groups that took part in the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, have used Wisconsin as a “training ground,” Zepecki said, when extremists met in Wisconsin while plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “These extremist groups are here. … they are dangerous,” Zepecki said, adding, “We also have the dangerous, dangerous idea that the votes of the people of Wisconsin don’t matter.”

“It’s really important to remember that here in Wisconsin, the fraudulent electors, these are not random people who walked off the street and decided to do this,” said Barnes of Law Forward, adding that Andrew Hitt, the former head of the state Republican Party and Robert Spindell, a current member of the Wisconsin Elections Board were among those who cast false electoral votes for Trump. “This is a big deal,” said Barnes. “It’s a danger to our democracy, and certainly to our future elections, which we know will continue to be close. And we must make sure that voters continue to decide the outcome of elections in our state.”

Barnes connected the revelations of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings to recent unpopular U.S. Supreme Court decisions on abortion, gun safety and voting rights, saying, “the facade that these unpopular views are winning in our political discourse is really starting to crumble.”

“We’re seeing that as the committee uncovers more and more of this conspiracy, the extreme actions that these folks had to take to try to hold on to power. We know that Wisconsinites and Americans do not agree with them.“

On Tuesday, “I think we will learn more about what happened with this coordinated criminal conspiracy theory,” Barnes said, “and hopefully be able to hold some of the bad actors here in our state accountable to make sure this never happens again.”

Johnson of BLOC, an organization committed to building political power at the street-level for underserved communities, said, “The best way to describe how we’re all feeling is pissed off.”

The voters he has contact with have been angry to learn about Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in attempting to deliver Wisconsin’s fake electoral ballots to Vice President Mike Pence, he said. Community members feel poorly served by political leaders who would rather cheat to hold onto power than win by meeting the real needs of their constituents, he said.

“No one is exempt from the law — Black, white … Pacific Islander, American Indian — all of us in Wisconsin want everyone to be held accountable,” he added.

“I think it’s important to understand that it isn’t really about 2020,” said Roys. “It is about undermining confidence in our whole electoral system and the mechanisms for how we vote.” By casting doubt on a highly decentralized election system, Trump and his supporters continue to try to set up a plan to steal the next election, she said.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.

It’s pretty hard not to take it personally when the highest court in the land erases your humanity. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has rolled back a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, the power of the state reaches right through us, deciding what happens inside our bodies. What we think and feel doesn’t matter. It doesn’t get more personal than that.

By “the state,” I mean, of course, “the states” — in our case, the gerrymandered Republican majority in the Wisconsin Legislature, which the Supreme Court put in charge when it declared, “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

That phrase “the people and their elected representatives” is a cruel joke in Wisconsin, where the people elected Democrats to represent them in every statewide race in 2018 and chose Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020, yet Republicans retain control of our Legislature because they’ve rigged the maps.

Never mind that. State legislatures are the proper forum for regulating individuals’ most intimate lives, according to the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided” according to that opinion, because the Court “short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who disagreed with Roe.”

Most Americans agree with Roe. So do most Wisconsinites. But in states like Wisconsin, where the minority rules, we are governed by the extremists who refuse to revise our Civil War-era felony abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest. (And despite Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ promise not to enforce that ancient, draconian law, it is effectively now in force, since Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has decided to stop providing abortions to avoid the risk of future prosecution.)

The rightwing extremists are coming for us. And it feels very personal.

That reality hit close to home in a different way on July 4th, when we learned about the horrific mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. After murdering seven people at a holiday parade, the shooter drove to Wisconsin, where he planned to commit another mass murder. I was at my house in Madison with my family, sheltering from the thunderstorms that caused our local fireworks display to be canceled, when the shooter drove through town. Apparently he only dropped the idea of going on another shooting spree here because he didn’t have a solid plan in place. A near miss.

Keep in mind that Robert Crimo, the 21-year-old Highland Park shooter, was a licensed gun owner who bought his AR-15 style assault weapon legally.

And, according to another recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, when it comes to guns, “the people and their elected representatives” must not meddle in the sacred individual right to purchase a weapon of mass murder.

In a ruling striking down a New York law that restricted the right to carry a pistol or revolver unless the gun owner could demonstrate a credible need for self protection, the Court ruled that the restriction “violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense.”

So states can make it illegal for 10-year-old incest victims to obtain an abortion after being raped, but they can’t stop people like Crimo from bringing their guns to parades, church picnics, and other public gatherings. As Bill Berry wrote in a commentary last week, the Second Amendment has superseded the First Amendment, with its quaint language about “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” We’ve lost that right.

This madness Republicans pass off as patriotism is anathema to American values of liberty and democracy.

As Americans we expect to have the right to be safe in our homes and communities. We expect to have the freedom to regulate our own bodies and private lives without overbearing intervention by the state — not to mention nosy neighbors deputized by state legislatures to chase young women and their family members across state lines on suspicion of seeking abortions where they remain legal. And we expect the right to actual representation, not despotic minority rule.

But the right wing of the Republican party has played a long game, undermining liberty and self-government.

As Nicole Safar, executive director of Law Forward, pointed out in a July 4th commentary for the Examiner, the same bad actors who worked for years to roll back abortion rights and defended anti-abortion terrorist organizations in the 1990s were also the architects of the Jan. 6 fake electors strategy and the attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump.

“There is a direct through line from the anti-majoritarian movement to overrule Roe and the anti-democracy efforts of the last decade,” Safar writes.

That effort continues with yet another case recently accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court — Moore v. Harper, involving North Carolina’s voting map.

In that case, North Carolina’s state Supreme Court declared an egregiously gerrymandered Congressional district map created by Republican legislators unconstitutional. The state’s Republican leaders appealed, using an obscure, legal theory called the “independent state legislature doctrine” to argue that state legislatures can make their own rules for federal elections, and that state courts can’t override them.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the North Carolina Republicans, state legislatures would be free to override the will of the people and choose the losing candidate in the next presidential election.

Expanding the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court — which progressives have called for and Biden has rejected — hardly seems like a radical idea compared with the complete overthrow of democratic elections. But somehow Biden still seems reluctant to take bold steps.

Women’s March activists gathered on Saturday at the White House, where many were arrested in a sit-in, demanding that Biden do more to protect abortion rights than the steps he took in the executive order he signed on Friday to ensure medication abortion is widely accessible and to protect patient privacy. Biden has been agonizingly slow to respond to the long-anticipated elimination of federally protected abortion rights, and advocates want the president to declare a public health emergency and make abortion services available in restricted states on federal land.

The Women’s March is right. The attacks on our rights, our democracy and our civil society have escalated to the point where we have to start taking these things personally. We have to fight like our lives depend on it. Because they do.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.