Here & Now

Legislative Leaders, Evers Preview Wisconsin's 2023 Budget

Frederica Freyberg:

In state news, next week Governor Tony Evers will give his budget address where he will lay out his vision for how the state should spend the $7 billion surplus. We asked the Legislative leaders and the governor if he should craft a budget that would be welcomed by Republicans or if he should continue to include big ideas even if they were dead on arrival in the Republican Legislature.

Greta Neubauer:

Our role, I do see, as twofold, right? We need to put forward that vision for what we believe Wisconsin should look like. We need to make sure that we’re continuing to say that working families deserve better and here’s the path that we would take to get them there. And we need to find every opportunity to work across the aisle. That’s what the budget process does, right?

Devin LeMahieu:

I think a better question is is the governor willing to actually negotiate with us during this budget cycle? If he wants to put out a budget with his political priorities, that’s fine but we’ll do what we’ve done in the past. Start from base and go forward. But if the governor is willing to work with us and negotiate, I think we can accomplish some of the things he wants to accomplish while still doing important tax relief, investing in education, expanding school choice.

Melissa Agard:

So my Republican colleagues might say, oh, we’re not going to legalize cannabis in Wisconsin. That’s dead on arrival. We’re not going to expand health care in the state of Wisconsin. That’s dead on arrival. We’re not going to support our public schools to the full capacity that we should. That’s dead on arrival. At the same time, we know that those are issues that the vast majority of the people in Wisconsin, upwards of 70-80% on some of these issues, support. They are not partisan. And this is our opportunity to debate them because frankly when they’re introduced as standalone bills in the Legislature, the Republicans who have control over that committee process aren’t even allowing us to come to the table and have a debate, having a committee meeting.

Robin Vos:

What Governor Evers is doing is if he chooses to put together a document that’s chock full of a wish list, he really can’t be critical when none of it’s included. There might be good ideas in there, right? And if he chooses to make it so full of things that are unappetizing to Republicans, you’re not even going to have a chance to have some of the better things taken a serious look at. It seems to me that most people around the country that I have seen in divided legislatures when you have a governor of one party and the Legislature of the another. They don’t start off with some kind of a crazy idea. Governor Doyle did that. If you look at how he chose to put his budgets together, he didn’t chock it full of all kinds of liberal crazy stuff. He put together what he thought was as reasonable as he could be and he hoped the Republicans would do the same thing. He probably got a lot more of the things he wanted than Tony Evers did with his method so it’s up to him to decide.

Tony Evers:

If we started with a compromise position first of all, people of Wisconsin would be utterly disappointed we didn’t talk about some issues they think are important and maybe the Legislature and the Republicans in the Legislature don’t. It’s important to talk about the values that we hear about and have people talk about it. And come to some compromise position if they can.