people that like remodel their house for graduation parties.
Yeah, oh it's it's it looks like a Hallmark card.
So she's doing that right now.
Okay.
So if you want to think it makes this interview last a lot longer,
I'm good with that.
We got a question.
Yeah, I know exactly.
Do you want this on a strict time limits?
I think I haven't, whatever my next time I say.
Okay.
We usually try and keep it.
Yeah, that's fine.
So I'll throw a timer on the phone.
But I don't think, oh, I've never had any issues getting our questions.
Well, I'll be good.
Yeah.
That's exactly what we want everywhere.
All righty.
Mr. Speaker, let's start with the tragedy at Abundant Life this week.
Is there a legislative response that you think should be brought forth in a bill?
Well, first of all, my sympathies and what a heartbreaking situation is just awful.
And one of the things that I always try to do in these situations is first of all,
wait for all the facts.
I have news reports, I've read things, but I don't know what's real and what's not.
So first of all, I think that in a lot of these cases, it's almost impossible to think
what could be done differently, looking backwards.
It sounds to me like far too often, it's a troubled teen who perhaps was bullied or
had issues at school, that's awful.
We've done some good things.
We have the Office of School Safety, which I support.
We certainly made it harder to get into a school by providing funding to harden the
entrances.
And then lastly, we put more money to school-based mental health.
I think those are good things.
I can't imagine we certainly wouldn't cut any of those programs.
I think we maybe could look at potentially increasing them, but just to get a tragedy
and I want to wait for all the facts before we make any final decisions.
Regarding the Office of School Safety, in the last budget, the Department of Justice
was upset that there wasn't the full amount that they requested to be funded,
especially for the tip line.
And Governor Evers stepped in with some federal COVID funding.
Do you expect to fully fund the tip line this time around?
I mean, I'm open to looking at all the details.
Again, I don't know, I mean, first of all, it has to work its way through the process.
I haven't seen all the budget submissions yet that has to go through Governor Evers first.
So I'm certainly open at looking at it.
I want to do things that are going to make a difference.
I think the worst thing we can do is try to politicize these things or make it some
kind of an ideological lens.
If there are things that really will make a difference, of course, we're going to support
those.
But to just say we did something and then have it either not work or go in the wrong
direction, I also want to be careful about doing that too.
This is a new majority for you.
You did lose some members, but you maintained a majority, but as a new makeup of the legislature,
what does that mean for you going forward?
Well, I think the reality is close majorities mean usually less happens.
You know, they have this belief that somehow if it's close majorities, more is going to
happen.
I mean, look at the Congress, the closer the majorities, whether it's Democrats and
Sherry Republicans, it doesn't really matter.
It just makes it harder to get consensus.
Now, the good news for Assembly Republicans is that for 20 years we've operated on a
consensus model where most of the time we argue and debate and cajole until we get
to a consensus, do the same thing.
I think there's a lot of priorities we have for Wisconsin that I'm excited to work on.
If there are some of those can be bipartisan, that's great, right?
And I hope all of them can be.
But I also am not going to sacrifice our principles simply because the election had a change.
Democrats seem to think that they're going to have more say or more input this session.
Coming off your last question, your last answer to that, what role do they have to play as
opposed to traditionally where it is that they wanted to sign on, they could, but they really
didn't have much influence on most legislation?
I think it's probably going to be similar.
I would say this that the freshmen who are coming in are clearly far left, right?
Many of them ran in districts as unabashed liberals, which they have every right to.
Well, we're Senate right conservatives.
So if there are areas we can find common ground and consensus, we are going to be all ears.
But the idea that we're somehow going to spend more than we would have or done a policy that
we wouldn't have supported before, absolutely not.
You know, it's just not going to happen.
So I hope we can find consensus.
We did last time.
I mean, with big strong majorities, we did, you know, shared revenue package,
the Brewers deal, alcohol, literacy, all kinds of big things.
Hope we can do those again.
What are you expecting from Governor Evers in his next budget proposal?
We're going to do the budget different than we've done before.
What happened last time is, of course, Governor Evers submitted it.
We threw it out.
We did our own budget.
We put in reductions in taxes and spending increases.
We had the biggest increase in a generation for schools, funding for, you know, nursing homes,
all kinds of good things.
And the problem was he took almost all the spending increases and vetoed almost all the
tax reductions.
So the reason that we have the surplus, more than half of it,
is literally the fact that tax cuts got vetoed and that money is now sitting in Wisconsin's treasury.
We're not going to spend that on growing government.
So what we're going to do is we're going to pass our tax cuts first.
We're going to actually find out how much money we have left over.
And then that's what we're going to invest in government.
We're not going to do it in reverse, where we spend on all the things that he wants,
and then we don't get the tax reductions that Wisconsinites deserve.
When do you expect to have those negotiations with the governor on what he will sign as
opposed to what he might be doing?
I mean, I'm happy to do it anytime.
I mean, as you know, during December, we had a caucus last week.
We're still kind of finding consensus.
We have to elect our leadership.
The Democrats just had their caucus.
So we're kind of finding our own consensus first.
I feel pretty good about where Assembly Republicans are.
Now we have to work with our Senate colleagues to make sure that they're in a similar place.
And then we'll sit down with the governor in January.
But I just want to be really upfront about it that, you know, we're going to have a different
budget process.
We are not going to have it where we spend a bunch of money, grow the size of government,
hoping for tax cuts.
And then, you know, like Charlie Brown and the football have it pulled out at the last minute.
And then we're stuck just with the spending increases and no reductions in revenues.
There are a couple of big cases before the Supreme Court are potentially coming to them
in Act 10 and JFC control over some finances and also Governor Evers Savitos.
The 400 year veto.
Funding.
How much do those influence how you do approach the budget?
Well, let's start by saying that the 400 year veto is going to be huge.
You know, the basic functions, you know, if you think of the way like Schoolhouse Rock,
you know, the governor executes the judges, you know, way and balance between the three
branches and the legislature appropriates the funding.
Well, under the way that Governor Evers, for the first time ever, used his veto, he created
a 400 year appropriation that that's really unprecedented.
So listening to the arguments, it sounds like the justices agree, but we don't know that.
So hopefully, if they strike down as unconstitutional, his line end of veto,
we'll have a discussion about how to fund schools and it'll be just like the normal process.
If for some reason, they say that that 400 year appropriation is done,
well, schools are mostly off the table and then we'll have to focus on the rest of the budget.
So hopefully not.
One of the things that also was really unfortunate is, look,
I'm a strong supporter of the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund,
where we use state dollars loosely matched with private or local dollars to buy open spaces,
to keep Wisconsin, you know, the environment that we want.
It's worked for literally 40 years.
Governor Evers wanted sole control, so he sued and the court agreed with him.
So now we have a program where it'll probably die because that idea of having consensus
in collaboration, where he got 98% of what he wanted, he wants 100,
and now he's going to probably end up getting zero.
So I hope we really think about all these lawsuits and trying to upset the balance of
how the traditional three branches have worked to say that if you're going to try to do it alone,
you're going to usually end up with nothing.
Right in the middle of the budget process, we're going to have a Supreme Court election.
Yeah, that's true.
Do you think the public will be looking at that election through the lens of all the things
that it touches or just as an election for the Supreme Court?
I hope they'll look at it in a bigger, more holistic way.
I mean, one of the things that concerns me the most is that one of the two candidates,
Susan Crawford, has been an activist attorney on all these liberal causes.
So one of the things that frustrates me the most is she fought to overturn,
I'm sorry, voter ID.
We're going to pass a constitutional amendment and put it on the April ballot so that
voter ID is in the Constitution, so it's protected going forward.
But I don't think people want those activist judges to be a super legislature.
We want to have that balance of powers where they're supposed to play the referee,
not choose red or blue as the team that they're working for.
So my hope is that the election is again about going back to that traditional norm
where whenever we have an election, we don't try to overturn the results of the last court.
But I guess the only time we'll tell.
So last four years, there's been a lot of federal money coming into the state
through various packages.
What are you expecting from the Trump administration?
Will that money tail off?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm excited about the idea of having block grants coming back
where states are given the ability to be the laboratories of democracy that we're supposed to be.
I hate the idea that a bureaucrat in Washington decides for all 50 states and territories
that it's all going to be one way or not.
So I love the idea.
Let's take Medicaid, Badgercare.
I'd love for it to come back to Wisconsin so we could be more innovative,
focus on healthier outcomes, and try to have some differences from the way the program works.
You know, we've tried to do a healthy foods initiative.
That, unfortunately, didn't get support.
We tried to do a work requirement for people who are on Medicaid.
Able-bodied adults have to go and find a job.
Can't be on Badgercare forever.
That also didn't get supported.
So I hope that maybe the change in administration will allow us
to have some of these innovations coming to Wisconsin so we can show
that we're the place where new ideas can be proven correct.
Specifically, what would it mean if the Department of Education was eliminated?
Has this been proposed by a number of Republicans?
Very little.
I mean, you know that I don't know the exact number,
but I feel like it's 92% of the dollars that are spent on Kato education are from the states.
Very little is federally funded.
The biggest program is probably student loans and things like that.
Well, if you ask any parent who had kids applying for FAFSA last year,
it was totally screwed up.
Kids didn't even have any idea what their financial aid was going to be.
So the federal government running it certainly isn't the right answer.
So again, I'm excited about the idea of returning that money to the states.
Let's figure out how we can do it better.
And I think that we will have a program that every parent can have confidence in
as opposed to this FAFSA Fiasco where it really was a cluster for most of the year.
A year ago in this interview, I asked you,
how would you define success a year from now?
You said, I want to retain the majority.
I'd like to see a GOP president and I want to fight inflation.
How would you grade your prediction?
I guess that's pretty good, actually.
I'm glad I did that.
I mean, obviously we have a GOP president.
That's good for the country.
We kept the majority.
The Democrats were certain that if they had new maps,
they would be able to get the majority.
What I've said for really the entire time I've been elected
is we have better candidates, a better message, and people who work harder.
We prove that correct.
That's great.
Inflation, that's our last step in the equation
because I really thought that those tax cuts would have already taken effect.
Here we are where Governor Evers kept the money in the Treasury.
We're still going to have a chance to correct that one last thing.
And maybe I'll get all three right.
How would you define success one year from now?
I'm passing a meaningful tax cut where at least half of the surplus
goes back to the citizens of Wisconsin.
Finding a way for us to make sure that we cooperate with ICE
so that if someone is an illegal immigrant and they commit a crime in the United States,
they're deported back to their home country.
And I would say lastly that we have an actual understanding
of how we're going to deal with judging whether or not
kids are successful in school or not.
This idea that Jill Underley is going to rig the numbers
and basically slide the scale to make it look better for her reelection
than somehow schools are doing better than they are.
I think we should all say that's out of bounds.
I want schools to do great, but I want them to have an actual measure
where we can say, yes, this is working or no, that's not.
Make the changes that actually happen.
I think that would be exciting.
And then I would say the last thing, Zach, is we're announcing today
the creation of a brand new committee that's going to be similar to Doge,
but it's called GOAT, Government Oversight Accountability and Transparency,
that's going to look at kind of returning to our roots.
Republicans have always been the party of reform.
We're the place where a whole lot of good ideas were
births from workers' compensation to school choice.
We want to return back to that reforming idea.
So we're going to go around the state, look for ways to use technology.
How do we use AI?
How do we do better at delivering services for a lower cost?
And I hope that'll be something we can also look back and say,
what a great success that first effort was.
You mentioned how you're going to approach the budget,
but Governor Evers obviously has a budget.
Of course, yeah, yeah.
Do you think he should be a little more realistic?
This is going to be his fourth budget proposal each time.
He's kind of gone with his vision statement.
Would it be nice to see him go with a more realistic approach of what could pass?
It sure would.
It's how Jim Doyle, toward the end of his tenure,
actually became much more successful at getting things done
and working with the legislature.
Governor Evers can go in alone.
I mean, that's what he's pretty much done for the past six years.
It hasn't been much success.
And I would certainly rather sit at a cable and collaborate
and find ways that we could actually achieve some things
as opposed to just arguing in the media and issuing press releases.
But, you know, my door is always open. Happy to do it.
All right, speaker boss.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks very much, Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year to you.
Enjoy your time off the parties.
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it.
Yeah, it'll be good.
So is there ever a party you can throw
where you're not expected to bring popcorn?
No, that's kind of one of my jobs.
That's great.
Yeah, that's great.
And this year we have chocolates too though.
Oh, perfect.