Inside Wisconsin Politics

>> The Wisconsin Senate wraps up its regular business for 2026.

What passed, what didn't, and what can we learn from the way this Senate voted?

This is inside Wisconsin politics on WPR Capital Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson here with WPR capital reporter Anya van Wagtendonk WPR, political reporter Rich Kramer and PBS Wisconsin senior political reporter Zac Schultz.

Hey, everyone.

>> Hey, Shawn.

So we were all set to talk about how this session of the Wisconsin Senate was different than previous sessions.

And the Senate gave us lots to talk about, including as we're getting ready to record news that the Senate Majority leader, Devin LeMahiue, is not going to seek reelection, which in the world of the state Capitol, as you all know, that is a pretty big deal.

Zack, what can we take from that, given the way that the Senate has been acting this week?

And how big a deal is it in the Capitol?

>> Well, it certainly felt like a week of voting where people weren't worried about the next election or the next term.

There were questions of whether that signaled LeMahiue knew that his majority position was at stake.

As Republicans are worried about having the Dems flip the Senate.

But I think the bigger picture to look here is we're going to have a new majority leader in the Senate, a new speaker in the Assembly and a new governor.

And the last time that happened was 2011 with Scott Walker and the Fitz's running the show.

Big changes that time.

We might see big changes next session, too.

>> A wave election.

And there's people, of course, every every election is nationalized right now.

And there have already been people talking about whether this would be a nationalized democratic election.

Anya, you know, you know, that Capitol building and you know how much sway leaders carry, how big of a deal is it to you that Devin LeMahiue, the leader that you've covered in that Senate since you've been here is stepping down?

>> Yeah.

I mean, as Zack said, the session, the voting session only a few days ago was that two days ago.

I've lost track of time this week.

There were a few bills that came forward where there was a real question of whether Devin would let them get to the floor, because he did not have Republican votes.

And so there were kind of threats being floated about what that would mean for his leadership position.

necessary Democratic votes in order to pass.

And so then him stepping down, it really is this kind of signal that he whatever kind of consequences might have come in the caucus, he doesn't have to worry about them anymore.

>> And Rich, you were covering the session this week, and that question of whether or not to get Democratic votes is something that everyone was talking about.

And, you know, the Senate Senator LeMahiue even had some kind of not so veiled threats thrown out from a member of his own caucus.

Don't do that.

Basically, how unusual was this session week in terms of bipartisanship?

Frankly.

>> It was pretty unusual.

I mean, to me, someone who's pretty new at covering state politics, it feels a little strange when getting Democratic votes on a Republican bill or Republican votes on a Democratic bill is a big deal.

It seems like that would be normal.

But that's not the case.

And that was more of a sign of what you all have been talking about, that things are changing there.

It feels like things are changing in the Senate.

They used to have a supermajority not that long ago.

Then we got new maps after the Wisconsin Supreme Court's Liberal majority struck down, ones that were drawn by Republicans back in 2011.

And then we had an election under those maps.

So that supermajority went down to 18 Republican senators.

And that threat goes to this thing called the rule of 17.

It's an informal rule, but the idea is that if you're in the majority, you pass bills with majority support.

You don't even really consider them if you don't have those 17 votes.

But we saw examples where Devin LeMahiue went ahead and passed them anyway with Democratic support.

>> And that's a that's a very informal rule as far as the workings of the Capitol go.

I mean, it's not in the Senate rules.

It's certainly not in law, but it is an internal Republican caucus thing.

>> Shawn bring us back to Fitz.

When Fitzgerald ran the Senate, his philosophy, I'm sure you recall, was you don't go to the floor unless you have the votes.

So clearly, LeMahiue knew what he was doing when he came to the floor with those bills.

>> He's on it a few times, too.

Senator LeMahiue has I mean, they did it with the big local government funding bill a couple of years ago.

They needed Democrat support to get that through.

There was the budget this last time, this very bipartisan deal between Speaker Vos and, you know, Governor Evers and that needed Democratic votes.

So I don't I haven't seen Devin LeMahiue adhere to that rule that in the way that Scott Fitzgerald did when Scott Fitzgerald, you know, was leader for a long time, he was more like Scott Fitzgerald was more of like a a Robin Vos kind of leader.

Been there forever.

Kind of ruled with an iron fist in the Senate, didn't get pushed around on too much when he did go to Democrats for votes, it was sparingly.

>> Well, and that rule is a lot easier to maintain if you have a lot of wiggle room.

So if you have a supermajority, as Rich mentioned, you can lose some of your members and it's not a big deal.

But as the margins have gotten smaller and smaller, and now Democrats are talking about trying to flip the Senate, and I think they stand a pretty good chance of doing so.

Maybe they're also kind of seeing the writing on the wall, that being a leader would be a whole lot harder if you have just a very slim majority or no majority of all at all.

>> So let's unpack a couple of the bills where this did end up being a factor.

This week you had online sports betting bill that would legalize online sports betting in Wisconsin.

If the servers for that betting are located on tribal lands.

Rich, what were the arguments on that one in the Senate this week?

>> Well, so generally, the Republican opposition argument was that we shouldn't be we shouldn't be expanding legalized gambling in Wisconsin.

It causes addiction.

It hurts people.

ET cetera.

That was the bulk of the GOP argument.

Democrats were saying, well, it's already here.

You know, sports betting online is happening on the margins, on the outside, on the edges.

And this way, the state can have some regulations in place.

And Democrats like that, the the tribes get to play a role in this and that the money is going to tribes and also the state rather than major companies like DraftKings or FanDuel that are out of state.

>> And the the details on this one are pretty significant, I think.

I mean, if you've watched sporting events, you see ads for FanDuel or DraftKings just everywhere now, which you did not used to see in the very recent past.

Those companies don't like this bill, though, because it would an industry group said that they would have to share 60% of their revenue with the tribes and their, you know, these companies are saying, we just won't do business here in Wisconsin if you do it that way.

That is not an argument that I heard opponents making against this, though.

We heard very strong arguments against Ana from social conservatives when it comes to gambling.

>> Yeah.

So there's the argument that, again, there's kind of a social problem with gambling, but then also there's a real kind of messy legal situation here where it's a mix of state, federal and tribal law, all of which is at play, and then some of which has not been tested.

And so one of the pushbacks from, for example, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the conservative law firm, is that this creates an unconstitutional kind of ethnic monopoly, right?

Giving the tribes the monopoly, even though the compacts with the tribe says that they are in charge of gambling in the state.

And so those arguments are kind of at play.

And so I think we're going to see quite a bit of legal push pull over how to implement this.

>> Well, it's still not even clear if Governor Evers is going to sign this bill.

That's right.

His statements just yesterday tribes on board and that so far that is not the case.

There are some tribes that are out ahead of the rest of them when it comes to casino profits and revenues.

And there are some some of the ones in northern Wisconsin where they have casinos, but they're not that profitable and not nearly to the scale that the rest of them are.

So it may take the tribes working together to actually get Governor Evers to sign off on this.

So all of this may go for a bill that gets vetoed, saying we need to work on it for next year.

>> And, you know, we're focused on the Senate here and how they were acting different with this, you know, 2026 election on the horizon.

Toni Evers is absolutely acting different now because he knows he's not going to run again.

So he can basically look at every bill and say, is this really what I want?

If not, let it go.

Veto, move on.

You know, keeping on that sports theme, we had another big bill this week with name, image and likeness or nil.

Tell us about that.

You're a huge sports fan.

I know.

>> I do that one.

I care so deeply about college sports.

I care deeply about political policy as it affects college sports.

And so I got to learn all about this.

So Nil deals, this comes out of a 2021 sort of change in how college athletes are treated.

They're no longer amateurs.

They can get paid for their work and they can kind of wrangle these deals according to how popular their sport is and how good they are at their sports.

And so what that has led to is athletes being able to transfer schools in search of more lucrative deals in a way that, as I understand it, as someone who does not follow the Badgers terribly closely, has not been great for Badgers football in particular, and I might be getting some knowing glances from the actual football fans among us.

But so what this bill would do is put $14.5 million towards UW-Madison for athletic facilities fees in order for the school to have a pot of money to make these deals with players.

So the idea is that they'd be able to bring in top football and basketball talent in particular.

This passed out of the Assembly almost unanimously, and then it became this big open question at the Senate because it was a LeMahiue bill.

But then he was losing a ton of support within his caucus.

And so the question up until it basically the day of the floor vote was, will he spike his own bill in order to maintain the rule of 17, or will he go to Democrats for support?

And there was some pretty dramatic stuff on the floor that happened.

It passed very narrowly, but it passed because of Democrats.

>> Rich.

That was a very close one in the Senate, as I recall, like just a one vote margin.

So you talk about needing Democratic votes in every sense of the word.

You know, Devin LeMahiue needed that.

What was that one like?

>> It it was a voice vote, essentially, or I should say it wasn't a voice vote.

It was a roll call vote.

But there wasn't a lot of debate or any that I remember in the Senate, but just kind of looking, pulling back a little bit, I wanted to say that it's interesting to see Republicans, any Republicans send more money to UW-Madison, just basically overall, they have been pretty distrustful of the university on all kinds of fronts.

So to see as many, you know, send them more money as there were, was something.

>> Well, what's interesting about this bill and the way that it works is that it allows for that money to be transferred into the university, sold it as we already getting money for basketball and football players.

But freeing up this money allows us to share it with our Olympian sports.

So the swimmers, the rowers, volleyball, very successful women's hockey program saying we may have to shutter some of those if we don't have this flexibility for a little more money.

But what it does is it solidifies the lack of transparency for all of these contracts.

I interviewed UW athletic director Chris McIntosh a couple months ago, and I asked him about, you know, why don't we see more of what these people are getting paid?

Because they are now professionals.

They are contracts that are signed between the university and their agents.

And he said, well, we can't, because if our competitors know what we're paying our potential quarterback or our point guard, then they can come in and offer them more and steal them away from us.

The question becomes, there were some Dems who raised this during the debate is, what happens if this lack of transparency for the open records gets applied to coaches contracts?

What happens if there's other deals for outside support that all of a sudden get hidden under this idea of, well, we anti-competitive.

We can't let anyone know how much we're paying anyone.

And there's a lot of concerns out there.

And we saw, I think, Senator Hesselbein, the leader of the minority leader of the Dems, say if the Dems have power next year, they would definitely come back and revisit that particular angle.

So it's definitely something to watch for how it's applied.

I think most people are supportive of athletes getting paid for the work that they're doing, but there's a question of where's this money coming from and what does the public know about this, since it is public support?

And full disclosure, we're also UW employees, right.

>> And and our salaries are public.

And that is an open record.

>> I'm waiting for mine.

>> Yeah.

Me too.

>> So the the Senate adjourned this week.

The Assembly has been done like forever now a month ago, which feels a long time in legislative politics.

They like to do this under Speaker Vos or Speaker Vos likes to do this.

Get done first, set the agenda, you know, make everybody kind of go on your timeline.

And so then everything that they pass is either going to get passed in the Senate in that form, or it's dead.

And one of the bills that did die was this Republican data center bill would regulate data centers.

Speaker Vos very helpfully had a forum on the last day of Senate session where he had some opinions about the Senate not taking up his data center bill.

Ana what did he have to say?

>> Yeah, I mean, this was basically the closest that the legislature came to having any type of regulatory bill for data centers, which of course, are kind of exploding across the state.

And the fact that it is that it did not reach the floor of the Senate means that the session has passed without basically any guardrails, any new guardrails coming on.

But this was a Republican bill Vos championed it, and it essentially put certain guardrails, especially around energy use of data centers.

So, for example, they would have to recycle the water that they use if they wanted to use renewable energy sources, they would have to cite those on the properties of the data centers.

So you couldn't rely on community solar panels or whatever.

And the data centers would have to be responsible for any upgrades to the energy grid.

So it was just this kind of intro attempt at regulating this.

It was primarily a Republican bill.

It had a few Democratic votes in the Assembly, but most Democrats said this is rushed.

We need to be more thoughtful about how we are regulating data centers.

And then the Senate didn't even bring it to the floor.

But Vos talked about, you know, that really being as he thought, an issue for Senate Republicans, that if they don't kind of lead on this issue, that it might cost them votes in November.

>> Yeah.

It's rare to hear a speaker come out against a majority leader from his own party the week that he's still in session with that kind of criticism.

I think sort of the secret was sort of out on Tuesday.

I mean, we didn't know know that Devin LeMahiue was not going to seek reelection, but there was talk about it.

There was speculation about it.

People are looking at the Senate math and they're thinking about it.

>> Well, it changes a lot when no one has to worry about reelection next year.

Evers, Soros and LeMahiue can all speak in ways that we have not heard or we have not heard them speak publicly.

We've heard them off the record or heard from their staffers.

But I think this bill in particular still has the next election cycle written all over it, as Vos pointed out, because it's a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign.

There are different Democrats running for governor.

They've talked about freezes and the PSC and rate commissions and how data centers work.

I asked all the candidates about this when I interviewed them all in December, and there were a lot of like, dainty footsteps about how to approach this because they knew it was a hot button issue, but they were still trying to figure out how far could they go, where would the public be ahead of them?

And they're still figuring this out because they right now, it doesn't fall on a clear Republican Democratic divide, which is why I think the Senate didn't really know what to do with it.

I think if LeMahiue had a strong point of view, he would have brought up the floor and let Democrats help pass it if he thought that was the way to go.

But there's not a clear advantage at this time.

And Tom Tiffany, as governor is clearly campaigning on this issue as well.

So this is definitely one for the fall.

>> Rich.

follow up on what Zac said.

Recent Marquette University polling shows, of course, people are very opposed to data centers, but even pollster Charles Franklin said it doesn't appear that the political parties have picked their lane on it, really.

So it's it's kind of up in the air.

>> Okay, so this was the last regular session day.

They adjourned pursuant to s RFK, Jr.

one.

That's how you know it's real.

But they could, in theory, come back on a couple topics.

There's still talk about a property tax and education special session.

Talk about a gerrymandering session real quick.

Are these things going to happen?

Zac, you go first.

>> The only reason there's still a prayer that any of this could happen is because everyone's leaving and it's legacy time for all three of those people.

>> Rich.

>> Ditto.

>> Predict a future for us.

What do you think?

Okay, Anya, how about you?

>> Well, there will be a special session on gerrymandering, no matter what.

The question is just whether will they gavel in and gavel out in a few seconds, or will they actually take up some kind of a bill?

>> Okay, I'm going to say definitely gavel in, gavel out on gerrymandering.

That's my firm take on that one.

And we can we can replay this later.

>> Absolutely.

I have some money on it.

Maybe.

>> I think, you know, it's an unusual enough a bipartisan enough session on the other stuff with property taxes and education funding that they may have real incentives to reach a deal and not have to be talking to voters about why didn't you address these issues?

So maybe that's enough to get them all there.

Thanks all for for joining us on this, our first episode of Inside Wisconsin Politics.

Be sure to follow us on PBS Wisconsin on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.