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.
I'm WPR Capital Bureau Chief Sean Johnson, here with WPR Capital Reporter Anya Van
Wacktendank, WPR Political Reporter Rich Kramer, and PBS Wisconsin Senior Political Reporter
Zach Schultz.
The Wisconsin Senate Wraps Up.
I'm WPR Capital Bureau Chief Sean Johnson, here with WPR Capital Reporter Anya Van
Wacktendank, WPR Political Reporter Rich Kramer, and PBS Wisconsin Senior Political Reporter
Zach Schultz.
Okay.
Can you make sure to give us a cue that Mike's are closed at the end so we can resume our
chit chat at the table and that looks super awkward in the close.
Thank you.
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.
I'm WPR Capital Bureau Chief Sean Johnson, here with WPR Capital Reporter Anya Van
Wacktendank, WPR Political Reporter Rich Kramer, and PBS Wisconsin Senior Political
Reporter Zach Schultz.
Hey, everyone, thanks for joining us.
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 Lemahue is not going
to seek reelection, which in the world of the state capital, as you all know, that is
a pretty big deal.
Zach, 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?
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 signal Lemahue knew that his majority position was
in 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 Fitzs is 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 election that 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 Lemahue, the leader that you've covered in
that Senate since you've been here, is stepping down?
Yeah.
I mean, Zach 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 and those bills passed with 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 Lemahue 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.
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 Lemahue went ahead and passed them anyway with Democratic
support.
And 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.
Sean, 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, Lemahue, following that pattern, knew what he was doing when he came to the
floor with those bills.
He sounded a few times too, Senator Lemahue 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 Voss
and Governor Evers, and that needed Democratic votes.
So I haven't seen Devin Lemahue adhere to that rule that in the way that Scott Fitzgerald
did, when Scott Fitzgerald was leader for a long time, he was more like, Scott Fitzgerald
was more of like a Robin Voss 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 super majority, 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 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 this online sports betting bill.
It 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 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 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 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 in this group said that they would have
to share 60% of their revenue with the tribes.
And there, 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 Anya 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 of 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 said he wants all the 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 rise, and Tony 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, keep it 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 just 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 lemon hue bill.
But then he was losing a ton of support within his caucus.
And so the question up until 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 on the Senate, as I recall, just a one-mo of margins.
You talk about needing Democratic votes in every sense of the world.
Devin Lemmieu needed that.
What was that one like?
It was a voice vote, essentially.
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.
What's interesting about this bill and the way that it works is that it allows for that money
to be transferred and the university sold it as we are 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 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 we're paying our potential
quarter back or our point guard, then they can come in and offer a more and steal away from us.
The question becomes, as 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
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 of 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 our salaries are public and that is an open record.
Are we getting a mail?
That's one of the mail.
I'm waiting for mine.
Yeah, me too.
So the Senate adjourned this week.
This 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 Voss or Speaker Voss 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 Voss very hopefully 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 on you.
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 did not reach the floor of the Senate means that this session has
passed without basically any guardrails, any new guardrails coming on.
But this was a Republican bill, Voss 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 Republican bill.
It had a few Democratic votes in the assembly, but most Democrats said this is rushed.
We need to be sort of more thoughtful about how we are regulating data centers.
And then the Senate didn't even bring it to the floor.
But Voss talked about 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, no, that Devin Lemieux was not going to seek re-election,
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 re-election next year.
I think that's what he's speaking to.
You 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 Voss pointed out, because it's a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign.
There are different Democrats running for governor that have 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 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 Lemon you 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?
Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on what Zach said.
The recent market 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 kind of up in the air.
Okay, so this was the last regular session day.
They adjourned pursuant to SGR one.
That's how you know it's real.
But they could in theory come back on a couple topics.
They're still talking about a property tax and education special session.
Talk about a gerrymandering session real quick.
Are these things going to happen, Zach, 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 the future for us.
What are you?
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.
We can replay this later.
Absolutely.
I think that I think 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 joining us on this, our first episode of Inside Wisconsin Politics.
Be sure to follow us on pbswisconsin.org, wpr.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We can do a couple of ticks of hay.
Hey, sure.
Yeah, you got it.
Oh, shit.
For the, for the table.
You see this?
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
Oh, shit.
Don't you mean oh, shoot?
No.
The Wisconsin Senate wraps up its regular business for 2026.
What passed?
What didn't?
what can we learn from the way this Senate voted?
This is inside Wisconsin politics.
I'm W.P.R.
capital bureau chief, Sean Johnson.
Here with NPR capital reporter Aneven Way rottendank,
W.P.R.
Wisconsin's senior political reporter Zach Schultz.
Hey everyone.
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.
I'm WPR Capital Bureau Chief Sean Johnson.
Here with WPR Capital reporter Anya Van Wagtendank, WPR political reporter Rich Kramer, and PBS
Wisconsin senior political reporter Zach Schultz.
Hey everyone.
Hey Sean.
Hey.
So how about Devin Lemihue?
That man.
I think he retired.
Oh man.
So soggy looking.
We're still rolling.
With or without goatee, sorry about it.
Glad the maps in focus even if he's not.