Republican co-chairs of the Wisconsin Legislature's budget committee Sen. Howard Marklein, left, and Rep. Mark Born explain why they are voting to kill more than 500 proposals from Gov. Tony Evers' state budget at a Capitol news conference on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)

Once again, Wisconsin Republicans are kicking bipartisanship to the curb as the state budget makes its way to the state legislature. 

As they have with the last two budgets proposed by Gov. Tony Evers, the Republicans in charge of the budget-writing process in Madison are eliminating just about everything the governor proposed. Never mind that he just won re-election by a larger margin than his 2018 election victory. Republicans clearly don’t see that as any kind of message from voters on which direction they’d like the state to go. 

Ahead of those votes, state Sen. Howard Marklein and state Rep. Mark Born, the Republican co-chairs of the powerful budget-writing committee, the Joint Finance Committee (or JFC), spoke with the media. They told reporters that they are essentially doing the same thing they did two years ago: strip the budget down to the studs. 

“We recognized right off the bat from the governor’s [budget proposal] document that it was something that was unrealistic, something that we really couldn’t work with,” said Born.

This type of attitude from Wisconsin Republicans has become so commonplace that no one expected anything otherwise. And the results from Evers winning in a Republican-advantage midterm didn’t change their process one bit. 

So what they did next was vote to eliminate more than 540 measures from the governor’s budget. 

“You know, people work hard to do the right thing, get the healthcare and education that they need, the housing that they need, but they need help from the Legislature,” Evers said in response in a video statement posted on Twitter. “We have enough resources. We can make a better state … I’m angry. I’ll admit it. I don’t get angry often, but this is a situation where the Legislature has to step up. They can’t just play games like this. Very disappointing.”

Items removed from the budget include: 

  • Medicaid expansion
  • Paid leave
  • $235 million for student mental health
  • $200 million to replace lead pipes
  • Capping co-pays on insulin
  • Legalizing recreational marijuana
  • Cutting taxes on those making less than $100,000 (or less than $150,000 for joint filers)
  • Adding universal background checks for firearm purchases
  • Creating an automatic voter registration system
  • Creating a program to provide free school meals for all children
  • Repealing the controversial “Act 10” law, restoring collective bargaining rights for public sector unions
  • Repealing the anti-union “right to work” law
  • Scaling back Scott Walker-era tax credits for manufacturers

While some of the proposals in the budget are ones that would invite your typical partisan battles in a purple state like Wisconsin, others are ones that polling shows has broad majority support. And in some cases, they are the types of policies that have significant support even from Republican voters. 

Let’s take a closer look at a few of those. 

We’ll start with Medicaid expansion. Over and over again, when this measure is put to the public, voters respond by wanting to accept the federal Medicaid expansion dollars made available through the Affordable Care Act (thanks, Obama!) 

Now, Wisconsin is one of just ten remaining states not to have accepted the expansion, and is the only holdout remaining in the Midwest (well, depending on whether or not you consider Kansas to be part of the Midwest). North Carolina’s similarly divided government just agreed to expand Medicaid earlier this year. Evers and Wisconsin Democrats have proposed this expansion so many times that we’ve all lost count. 

The most recent polling on this question from the Marquette University Law School Poll, the state’s gold standard in public polling, showed that 70% of voters say the state should accept Medicaid expansion funds. Of that, 96% of Democrats, 72% of independents and 41% of Republicans support the expansion. 

Paid leave is another policy that’s being enacted more frequently across the nation, and one that Evers put in the budget. Minnesota’s House of Representatives just passed a paid leave policy this week. In Wisconsin, even some Republicans were floating the possibility of enacting such a policy after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course, they didn’t follow through in this initial vote. 

But again, the policy has broad support. A Marquette poll asked about paid leave in their final poll before the midterms, and 73% of voters said they’d approve a proposal requiring businesses to provide paid family leave for mothers and fathers of new babies. This has overwhelming bipartisan support, with 95% of Democrats, 65% of independents and 62% of Republicans in favor of paid leave. 

Replacing lead pipes has even taken on a partisan tone in Wisconsin. Republicans have cut funding to replace lead pipes in each of Tony Evers’ last two budgets. In the first instance, GOP leadership said they were cutting the proposal because they said “too much money would go to Milwaukee.” Milwaukee, which has some rather old housing infrastructure, is where about 67,000 of the state’s 170,000 lead service lines are located. And while the state is getting tens of millions in federal funds to go toward replacing lead pipes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, more is still needed to meet the scope of the issue statewide in Wisconsin.

But when this was polled in 2019 by Marquette, Wisconsin voters were more than amenable to committing financial support, with 74% saying the state should support replacing lead pipes. That includes 84% of Democrats, 77% of independents and 57% of Republicans. 

Let’s take marijuana legalization, another policy being adopted by our neighbors in Michigan and Illinois, and soon-to-be Minnesota. The 2022 Marquette poll showed that 64% of Wisconsinites support legalization, including 82% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 43% of Republicans. Prior polling had also shown slight majority support for legalization among Republicans. 

Over and over again, Wisconsin Republicans ignore the will of the people in Wisconsin. They take these types of actions at the legislative level and it has an effect upstream, as Republicans and Republican-backed candidates have now lost 14 of the last 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin. Their blowout loss in the April election for Wisconsin Supreme Court was a real indication that people are getting fed up with an out-of-control state legislature that has become unaccountable and unresponsive to majority opinions in Wisconsin. Republican leaders in the legislature, like Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, deserve blame from his own party for those losses that continue to mount. 

Considering all the losses Republicans continue to take at the statewide level, it is astounding that they continue to toss policies like so many of these that have broad bipartisan support. Perhaps they’ve just been lulled into a state of comfortable complacency in their astonishing lack of bipartisanship. 

However, when Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz is sworn in on Aug. 1, cases challenging the state’s partisan redistricting are soon to follow. It won’t be a moment too soon in this state desperate for some checks and balances. If a redistricting case does eventually deliver maps that are more fair to Wisconsin’s legislature, decisions on these very budget items are the type of things that could be used in Assembly and Senate campaigns in more competitive districts.

But in the meantime, the budget process will continue to work through the halls of the Capitol in Madison. And the Republicans running the legislature will prove to be consistently unresponsive to majority opinion in the state. So much for bipartisanship in the purpliest of states.


Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s also written for The Daily Beast, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He’s won 13 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.