Candidates for the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election participated in their only debate of the campaign — Rick Esenberg of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Jeff Mandell of the liberal Law Forward shared their insights. The Trump administration announced the U.S. Dept. of Education would lay off some 1,300 employees, and UW-Madison School of Education professor Suzanne Eckes described what the cuts mean in practice.
 

Rick Esenberg and Jeff Mandell
President and general counsel, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and co-founder and general counsel, Law Forward

• During a 60-minute Wisconsin Supreme Court debate on March 12 produced by WISN, the conservative candidate — Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel — and the liberal candidate — Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford — squared off on topics ranging from abortion to campaign spending to sentencing decisions each have made as judges in criminal cases. Esenberg and Mandell are the lead lawyers for two organizations that are often in the middle of high-profile lawsuits over issues of public policy, and watched the debate. Each was asked who won.
• Esenberg: “I think that there’s a tendency in these debates for people to watch them and declare as the winner the one that they preferred going into the debate. I think that a lot of what was talked about is somewhat extraneous to the issues that come before a Supreme Court justice. But I think as a general matter, you have two candidates with two very different views of the law. I think one is far more likely to think that judges can impose their policy preferences on the rest of us, and the other candidate is less likely to believe that that’s a proper exercise of the judicial function.”
• Mandell: “I agree with Rick that a lot of this seemed extraneous. Based on what we saw in the debate, if there’s one candidate who is more activist and more interested in posing their policy preferences, I thought that came off as being Judge Schimel. Among other things, he was unable to articulate a single example of a time that he had issued a decision that didn’t fit his ideological preferences or those of his supporters. Any good lawyer or judge can think regularly of times where the law leads them in a direction they don’t want to go.”

Suzanne Eckes
Professor of education law, policy and practice, UW-Madison School of Education

• Wisconsin quickly signed on to a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Trump administration to “stop the dismantling” of the U.S. Department of Education, as a press release issued by Democratic state Attorney General Josh Kaul asserts. Eckes described the impact of cuts to the agency, with sweeping layoffs that encompass nearly half of its staff.
• Eckes: “This is going to have quite an impact on the U.S. Department of Education as a whole, and then specific departments, whether it’s related to the group that’s working on financial aid or the Office for Civil Rights. Over the years, Congress has enacted many statutes, federal laws, authorizing additional functions of the U.S. Department of Education …The U.S. Department of Education administers federal loans for college students under Title IV — Pell Grants, the FAFSA form for financial aid — they oversee Title I funds that provide schools with high numbers of low-income students additional funding. … It oversees crime statistics in higher education, accreditation in higher education to prevent diploma mills, vocational education programs, special education, and civil rights enforcement. That’s just to name a few of the areas that will be affected by these large numbers of layoffs this last week.”

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