Ruth Conniff, Wisconsin Examiner

The hotel ballroom in downtown Madison was packed with cheering supporters as Chris Taylor gave her victory speech Tuesday night after her huge, 20-point win over her conservative opponent Maria Lazar, cementing a 5-2 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The four other liberal women on the Court high-fived Taylor as she took the stage. The deliriously joyful crowd repeatedly interrupted Taylor’s remarks with shouting and applause, including to chant the name of her dog when she mentioned it during a lengthy list of thank-yous: “Ollie! Ollie!”

Democrats are so hungry for success they are ready to throw their arms around any champion, including canines — yellow, blue, whatever.

Eager to catch that wave of enthusiasm, many of the seven gubernatorial hopefuls in the Democratic primary field hovered around the ballroom. After the results were tabulated, party operatives began circulating statistics showing Taylor’s big margins of victory in Republican-leaning counties, using those results to forecast a crushing blue wave in November. Democratic Party Chair Devin Remiker called Taylor’s win “an indictment of Trump and Tom Tiffany,” the GOP candidate for governor....

Wisconsin was almost certainly on President Donald Trump’s mind when he said this week, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Our swing state was Ground Zero for the fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump narrowly lost here. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office was involved in the effort to pass off fraudulent Electoral College ballots cast by state Republicans for Trump. Our state Legislature hosted countless hearings spotlighting election deniers and wasted $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars on a fruitless “investigation” of the 2020 presidential results, led by disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who threatened to arrest the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.

So how worried should we be about Trump’s election takeover threats?...

According to the Eastern District of Wisconsin’s Interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schimel, freshly appointed to his position by President Donald Trump, the federal trial of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan had nothing to do with politics. “There’s not a political aspect to it,” Schimel told reporters after Dugan’s felony conviction on charges she obstructed U.S. immigration agents as they tried to make an arrest inside the Milwaukee courthouse. “We weren’t trying to make an example out of anyone,” Schimel said. “This was necessary to hold Judge Dugan accountable because of the actions she took.”

Schimel didn’t say whether Dugan’s very public arrest and perp walk through the courthouse was also necessary, along with the social media posts by Trump’s FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, crowing about the arrest and sharing photos of Dugan in handcuffs.

There is no doubt that the Dugan case was highly political from the start....

Success has many fathers, but U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden is not one of them. Contrary to Van Orden’s triumphant tweets, he did not “secure” $1 billion for rural health care in Wisconsin. He had nothing to do with the bipartisan state budget deal that was drafted and rushed to completion in order to capture those funds — which, by the way, represent just a fraction of the billions the state stands to lose in Medicaid funds under the Republican mega bill Van Orden approved.

What Van Orden did do was vote to cut Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance, with the result that tens of thousands of rural Wisconsinites now face losing their health care coverage and several rural Wisconsin hospitals are in danger of closing. As he prepared to join the narrow, four-vote majority that passed the disastrous federal bill, Van Orden sent some last-minute messages to Gov. Tony Evers urging him to hurry up and sign the deal Evers had already reached with state legislators. Now Van Orden is taking credit for Wisconsin leaders’ work mitigating the harm he caused. It would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.

For months, Evers and leaders of the Wisconsin Legislature met behind closed doors to hammer out a deal, even as massive federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other programs essential to the wellbeing of Wisconsinites loomed. Among the issues Evers and legislative leaders agreed on was the importance of getting the budget done before the federal mega bill was signed, so the state could still qualify for $1 billion in soon-to-expire Medicaid matching funds....

You have to hand it to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. As Republicans across the country run in fear from their constituents, refusing to hold town halls lest they be asked to answer for brutal federal budget cuts and threats to health care, nutrition assistance and Social Security, Johnson showed up at a Milwaukee Press Club event Wednesday and appeared cheerfully unperturbed as he took questions from journalists and a skeptical crowd. Not that his answers made sense.

People sitting in front of the podium at the Newsroom Pub luncheon crossed their arms and furrowed their brows as Johnson explained his alternative views on everything from global warming to COVID-19 to the benefits of bringing the federal budget more in line with the spending levels of 1930 — i.e. the beginning of the Great Depression, before FDR instituted New Deal programs Johnson described as “outside [the president’s] constitutionally enumerated powers.”

A handful of protesters chanted in the rain outside the Newsroom Pub, but overall, the event was cordial and reactions muted. In part, this was attributable to Johnson’s Teflon cockiness and the barrage of misinformation he happily unleashed, which had a numbing effect on his audience. ...