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The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Frederica Freyberg:
Without legal abortion in Wisconsin, physicians are caught in the legal crossfire, and with the basis upon which Roe was overturned, many are worried gay marriage could be next to go. The approaching primary election has everyone from candidates to clerks working overtime.
I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” Senator Tammy Baldwin on the Respect for Marriage Act and the newly thinned Democratic primary contest. Elections Commissioner Ann Jacobs responds to the latest chicanery from election fraud believers. Zac Schultz outlines the GOP candidates running for attorney general, and an ER doc on the dangerous legal limbo of medical abortions. It is “Here & Now” for July 29.

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Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
The nation’s first openly gay U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is working to get ten Republican senators to vote in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would establish the right to same-sex and interracial marriage in federal law. Despite the majority of the public supporting same-sex marriage, including Republicans, the push for passage of the bill enshrining that right could be an uphill climb. Senator Tammy Baldwin joins us now and thank you so much for being here.

Tammy Baldwin:
It is a pleasure to join you.

Frederica Freyberg:
Senator, first, we want to ask you what with Alex Lasry, Tom Nelson and Sarah Godlewski now dropping out of the democratic primary race for U.S. Senate, will you now formally also endorse Mandela Barnes?

Tammy Baldwin:
I will be talking with the remaining candidates, and, certainly, as I’ve always said, I’ll going to be behind the nominee. It appears that will be Mandela Barnes, and I’m very excited about the race ahead.

Frederica Freyberg:
Because what does the thinning of the field say about his candidacy in your mind?

Tammy Baldwin:
Well, I think it’s a strong candidacy. He is certainly running a very good race and getting all around the state, and talking to the Wisconsin voters, but the contrast in the general election could not be more clear. And Mandela Barnes is somebody who’s focused on the people of his district when he used to be in the state legislature, and now all of the people of the state of Wisconsin as lieutenant governor.

Frederica Freyberg:
So as to the Respect for Marriage Act which we invited you on to talk about, why is this bill needed now?

Tammy Baldwin:
Well, in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, it has implicated a number of other cases that the court has decided on similar grounds. Whether that’s access to contraception or same-sex marriage or interracial marriage, all were based in part on a constitutional right to privacy, which the majority says does not exist, and so people need certainty. This is a time of great fear and anxiety, about whether same-sex couples’ marriage license will be valid, and the rights and responsibilities associated with marriage are critically important to protect one’s family, and so the Respect for Marriage Act would codify the Obergefell decision and people could rest assured their marriage certificate is valid.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, I understand you need ten Republican senators to vote yes. What’s your current count?

Tammy Baldwin:
There are five Republicans who have publicly stated that they will support the Respect for Marriage Act, and I have spoken with an additional — well, additional many, but five additional members have indicated they are leaning in support, but I think because of how crowded the calendar is for next week, which is our last week before the August recess, and in light of the fact that we can’t have any absences, we need everybody there, and we have a few members with COVID, this is probably going to be a vote that occurs, what I would hope would be early September.

Frederica Freyberg:
So on the vote, though, the latest Gallop poll on the matter showed 70% of the public support same-sex marriage, including 55% of Republicans. Is there a disconnect for elected officials as so why, you know, you have to talk to these other five?

Tammy Baldwin:
The Congress of the United States, sadly, has often followed public opinion rather than led public opinion, and I am still very hopeful that we will have — in fact, I believe we do have the ten votes necessary to avoid a filibuster, but, yeah, it is something where I have — in the arena of civil rights, the U.S. public is often ahead of their elected representatives, and that’s too bad. There’s also, you know, sadly, a very strong difference between the parties. Every Democrat in the U.S. Senate supports the Respect for Marriage Act, and I don’t think this should be an issue that is reflective of a partisan divide, but it seems it still is.

Frederica Freyberg:
There is this. Senator Ron Johnson, arguably one of the most conservative members, has said he had “no reason to oppose the measure,” but then he came back and accused Democrats of creating a state of fear over an issue in order to further divide Americans for political benefit. How do you reconcile that?

Tammy Baldwin:
Well, I’m going to take him at his word when he said that he has no reason to oppose it, and I would view that as that he would support it, but I think that we have been trying very hard not to politicize this and to respond, again, to the fact that the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade precedent of 49 years and their reasoning leads people to legitimately fear that the Supreme Court would later overturn cases involving access to contraception and cases like Loving vs. Virginia and
Obergefell which deal respectively with interracial marriage and same-sex marriage.

Frederica Freyberg:
Your call for this bill comes as a result of that Clarence Thomas concurring opinion raising the issue in reversing Roe, but on that, Wisconsin as you know, now reverts back to its 1849 law with no exception for rape or incest. What do you think our state legislature should do on this? What is your message?

Tammy Baldwin:
Well, I think that they certainly should not send women back to the mid-1800s where, at a time when women did not even have the vote. It is un– it’s hard to put words — into words how chaotic this case has made things in terms of women being able to access the healthcare they need and to be able to have bodily autonomy and choose when and whether to have a family. The fact that Wisconsin women have fewer freedoms than their mothers and grandmothers is just hard to wrap our arms around. I think the state legislature needs to appeal that 1849 law, and I believe that they should codify a state version of something similar to Roe versus Wade.

Frederica Freyberg:
We need to leave it there. Senator Tammy Baldwin, thank you very much.

Tammy Baldwin:
Thank you.

Tim Ramthun:
The people of this state don’t feel that the election was certifiable, therefore, the request to decertify is on the table, and it should take an action.

Frederica Freyberg:
So Republican candidate for governor and state Representative Tim Ramthun continues to call on the legislature to decertify the 2020 election. That is regarded as a legal impossibility, but the fallout from the last election continues to royal Wisconsin in all the ways we know. The Gableman investigation, the false electors, the state Supreme Court rulings on ballot drop boxes and calls to abolish the Elections Commission, and now there’s more that prompted an emergency meeting of commissioners Thursday night. Someone at the epicenter of this, former chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Democrat Ann Jacobs. Thanks very much for being here.

Ann Jacobs:
Thank you so much for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what came to light this week is the two people trying to prove election fraud vulnerabilities admitted to committing fraud by requesting absentee ballots in other people’s names including Robin Vos. As an election commissioner, what is your response to that?

Ann Jacobs:
I’m astonished at the fact that people are going out and intentionally committing election crimes and then pretending they are doing it to somehow prove fraud in an election. What they did broke the law, and they should be prosecuted.

Frederica Freyberg:
And so I know that the Elections Commission voted to put out fliers ahead of the primary, kind of warning clerks and others about this. What more specifically do you want, and how soon?

Ann Jacobs:
Well, what we want are for people to stop doing this, and we think law enforcement should stop encouraging it. What we did indicate was we would send postcards to people who have had their absentee ballots sent to an address other than their home address, their home registration address, just to be sure there wasn’t this sort of monkey business going around elsewhere. We also did notify clerks that they are obligated to refer cases of fraud, which would include cases like what we are discussing, to their local district attorney if they find it, and what we’re doing is encouraging people to use the myvote.wi.gov website to check their own absentee ballot status.

Frederica Freyberg:
Great. On another matter, what do you make of calls from people like Tim Ramthun and Donald Trump to decertify the 2020 election in Wisconsin?

Ann Jacobs:
Elections aren’t about feelings. Elections are about numbers. In the state of Wisconsin, we had an accurate, properly tallied, recounted election where Donald Trump lost by 20,000 votes. In comparison, in 2016, we had an accurately tallied, recounted vote where Donald Trump won by 20,000 votes. Same election administration. Same election officials. Same rules. Sometimes voters change their minds. Telling people that people feel the election wasn’t fair and accurate simply reinforces the incorrect position our elections was anything other than accurate.

Frederica Freyberg:
Wisconsin’s false Republican electors, including one of your fellow commissioners, are certainly on the radar of federal investigators. Why did the commission, though, unanimously vote not to sanction them?

Ann Jacobs:
The decision of the commission, I think, is best articulated in the memo given by the Department of Justice that was incorporated into our decision, and it was on that basis that the commission made that decision. Now, recall that the commission did that with Commissioner Spindell sitting in on it. He has since — since a lawsuit was filed, he’s now agreed to recuse himself from future discussions of it, and there’s now an action in circuit court to return the matter to the commission for further evaluation. The other thing that’s important to note is a lot of the recent information we’re receiving on the false electors came out after the commission’s decision.

Frederica Freyberg:
There have been calls to abolish the Elections Commission. What’s your response to that?

Ann Jacobs:
Well, that seems to be what the Wisconsin Legislature does every time someone they don’t like wins. We started out with the secretary of state, and then they didn’t like how that person administered the elections. So they created the State Election Board. Then they didn’t like that, so they created the Government Accountability Board. They didn’t like how the Government Accountability Board worked so they created the Elections Commission, and now that the Elections Commission, which requires bipartisan approval of all of its actions, now that they don’t like the Elections Commission because Donald Trump lost, they want to go back to a secretary of state.

Frederica Freyberg:
I want to get to this with just about a minute left. What effect, in your mind, does all of this, all this talk of decertification of elections, and law changes have on the average voter and the clerks?

Ann Jacobs:
Well, on the clerks, it’s made them — they’ve been accused of malfeasance. They’ve had physical and verbal threats made against them. That is beyond the pale and that needs to stop. For the average voter, I tell them go vote. Your vote will count. The vote is accurate. It’s safe. We want you to get out there and vote. We’ve got an election coming up in August. Another one in November. So let’s go vote.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. Ann Jacobs, thanks very much for joining us.

Ann Jacobs:
Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:
The August 9 primary election quickly approaches and two GOP candidates are vying to be the nominee to take on Democratic incumbent Attorney General Josh Kaul. Senior political reporter Zac Schultz has this story on the Republican candidates.

Zac Schultz:
The Office of Attorney General is frequently referred to as Wisconsin’s top cop. Republican Eric Toney says his ten years as Fond du Lac County district attorney have prepared him for the role.

Eric Toney:
I kind of like to say I’ve had the misfortune of prosecuting almost every case you can think of.

Zac Schultz:
Toney said he decided to run after the Jacob Blake shooting in August of 2020 led to riots in Kenosha. He said the incumbent AG, democratic Josh Kaul didn’t publicly support the police officer who shot Blake.

Eric Toney:
And to have an attorney general that’s not standing with our law enforcement, I could not sit back and watch that continue, and that’s what got me ultimately in this race for attorney general.

Zac Schultz:
Ironically, it was Toney’s candidacy that led his primary opponent, Republican Adam Jarchow, to enter the race.

Adam Jarchow:
I’m the only candidate in this race with the depth and breadth of experience to one day one immediately walk into that office and be able to handle every single one of the issues that would come before the AG.

Zac Schultz:
Jarchow previously served in the state Assembly but was out of office in 2021 when he started saying a conservative candidate needed to challenge Toney for the nomination.

Adam Jarchow:
Having a robust primary where issues are vetted, where candidates are vetted is incredibly important, and when you add to that that my primary opponent, Eric Toney, helped enforce Governor Evers’ illegal lockdown order by prosecuting small business owners.

Zac Schultz:
Toney says he never actually prosecuted anyone for not obeying the lockdown orders in the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eric Toney:
My primary opponent has attacked me relentlessly for COVID where my job is to follow the rule of law. Even when president Trump was supporting those safe-at-home efforts during the first 13 days, we had filed a small number of cases but I used my discretion to dismiss all of them because it was the right thing to do, and then when that illegal extended safe-at-home order came out in April, we didn’t enforce it at all here in Fond du Lac County.

Zac Schultz:
Toney says it’s his experience as a district attorney that sets him apart considering nearly every attorney general in state history has prosecutorial experience.

Eric Toney:
Voters will look at our top cop and they want someone that has that experience prosecuting, being in the trenches with our law enforcement, and I’m the only candidate that has actually done that.

Zac Schultz:
The third candidate in this primary is Republican Karen Miller, an attorney from Chippewa Falls. She did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. As for prosecuting experience, Jarchow says times are changing and it’s his experience that matters more.

Adam Jarchow:
As we’ve looked at the way the role of the attorney general has expanded all around the country, we see fewer and fewer prosecutors being elected to that office. That kind of was the old model. The new model really is people from the private sector or who have legislative experience because so much of what you do as attorney general is manage a huge agency.

Zac Schultz:
The attorney general has always been a partisan office, but Wisconsin voters have previously voted for a governor of one party and an AG of the other. But in the last decade, AGs across the country have become more active, challenging state and federal laws, acting in concert with their political parties.

Adam Jarchow:
It’s increasingly important because we’re in an era of unchecked power of the federal government and our own bureaucracy here in the state of Wisconsin, and so you have to understand that the role of the AG can be to rein in the federal government.

Zac Schultz:
Toney says there are limits to partisanship in office.

Eric Toney:
I’m going to follow the rule of law, and the rule of law is not always popular.

Zac Schultz:
Toney points to the current debate among Republican voters about the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

Eric Toney:
We have not seen any court here in Wisconsin make a determination of fraud to some level that could have had an impact on the 2020 presidential election here in Wisconsin.

Zac Schultz:
There was no widespread fraud that impacted the outcome of the election, but Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories have many Republicans convinced the election can be overturned.

Eric Toney:
We cannot decertify the election. There is no way to do it and I have talked about this all across Wisconsin. I have these discussions. I have this dialogue. That’s where the Republican Party is at. That’s why I received the overwhelming endorsement vote at our state convention because I’m willing to be up front and tell people the truth, not just when it’s popular.

Zac Schultz:
Jarchow says the key to convincing Republican voters the election was fair is to elect Republicans.

Adam Jarchow:
If we can secure our elections, which I believe we will do when we have a Republican governor and a Republican AG, that will restore faith in our election process.

Zac Schultz:
The winner of this primary will face Josh Kaul in the general election. And Toney says voters should consider electability. In 2018, Jarchow ran for state Senate in the special election and lost a seat that hadn’t voted for Democrats in decades and flipped back to Republicans the very next election.

Eric Toney:
If you can’t win that seat, you cannot win Wisconsin. Even at the state convention, his own county voted to support me. The people that know him best rejected him.

Zac Schultz:
Jarchow says the special election was a fluke in a strong year for Democrats. The opposite of what he expects for 2022.

Adam Jarchow:
Their base turned out and ours didn’t in a very low turnout special election. I don’t think that’s indicative at all of, you know, the kind of candidate that I’ve historically been, winning my Assembly seat by wide margins, and certainly not indicative of how we will thump Josh Kaul.

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Madison, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”

Frederica Freyberg:
A month into the U.S. Supreme Court decision eliminating the right to a legal abortion, doctors and patients are finding themselves in desperate situations, particularly emergency room doctors unsure if or when they can intervene with a medically necessary abortion to save the life of the mother. Marisa Wojcik sat down with Milwaukee-based emergency physician and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians Dr. Christopher Ford for more.

Marisa Wojcik:
How has the decision to limit access to legal abortion impacted emergency physicians?

Chris Ford:
Yeah. So what we are bracing for, more so, is an influx of patients who will, unfortunately, have adverse repercussions based on the limitation and access to safe and medically safe abortions.

Marisa Wojcik:
And when someone first comes to the ER, whether they know it or not, they’re pregnant, what are some of the serious conditions that you encounter?

Chris Ford:
Yeah. So what we typically will see regularly are complications relating to bleeding, infection. In that respect for women who are pregnant who are having complications and such, it can be devastating and even can be deadly too to patients as well.

Marisa Wojcik:
Can you give some examples?

Chris Ford:
Yeah. So one of the conditions that we see — not commonly, but we will see in the emergency department every now and then is a condition called a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. This is a condition in which the pregnancy will not be in the uterus where we would normally see a viable pregnancy, but rather in the outside area of the uterus or the adnexa. So one of the considerations for ectopic pregnancy or one of the things you must understand is that these pregnancies is not viable. Right now, in medicine, we do not have the technology or the capabilities of reseeding that pregnancy in the uterus, and so regularly, our typical standard of care, these are patients that would go to the operating room with our partners from the gynecology divisions to have essentially an abortion of that pregnancy in order to save the life of the mother. So that’s something that we want to continue to happen because, again, these are life-saving therapies, but also, for people to be aware, who are providers, that this is still something we are obligated to perform.

Marisa Wojcik:
And is that something that is standard, do you think, for emergency room physicians across the state?

Chris Ford:
My concern is at this point in time is what is going to happen to, you know, the rural doc, you know, when she is working at 2:00 in the morning, and you have this ruptured ectopic pregnancy that comes in? What we don’t want to happen is we don’t want that physician to be on the phone with a lawyer to try to determine what is right and what is wrong. What could the potential repercussions be both legally and professionally if she does what she knows is right for the patient and what can be life saving for the patient.

Marisa Wojcik:
Has that happened?

Chris Ford:
Yeah. So I have read multiple reports at this point in time by both ER docs and as well as gynecologists already in the state and some outside the state as well who have been on the phone with lawyers for a number of hours in order to, again, try to negotiate what is going to be the best way to care for these patients, and, again, what ramifications could be felt by that provider, you know, should they go ahead with therapy that they did, you know, just months ago, and what is the typical standard of care for these patients. So it’s definitely a situation now that has become very scary to be a provider and is also a detriment to the patients we are treating.

Marisa Wojcik:
And that’s for an ectopic pregnancy, which is considered to be more obvious, I guess, but there are a number of other conditions that are much less clear for physicians. Is there any sort of guidance that people can go to that they can make a quick decision?

Chris Ford:
Yeah. One of the policy statements was performed by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, that was most recently updated in late 2021 in which they leaned on the fact that we are covered as providers, both in the emergency setting as well as in the obstetrical setting to do the best thing for our patients in the moment in order to prevent any morbidity or mortality as we call it or any risk for death or bad outcomes.

Marisa Wojcik:
And yet, we’re still hearing stories of mothers that are infected or bleeding for many days. Have you seen or heard of any complications with miscarriages?

Chris Ford:
That is essentially the situation where we have people who have been on the phones for a number of hours now in order to try to determine if they can give that medication, you know, what would be the liability based on that, you know, in a state much like our own where that may not be legal. And so, fortunately, we have clear guidelines from a federal standpoint, however, the statewide standpoint is a little bit more of a gray area. The primary purpose of medicine is to do no harm. We need to continue to protect our patients and continue to do what’s safe for them.

Marisa Wojcik:
All right, Dr. Chris Ford, thank very much.

Chris Ford:
Thank you so much.

Frederica Freyberg:
You can watch the extended version of that interview on our website at PBSwisconsin.org and click on the news tab.
That’s our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a good weekend.

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Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.