While Trump’s Congress works on protecting tax cuts for the wealthy, GOP legislators in Madison offer their first order of business: making it harder to vote.
The story of the 2024 election is that voter discontentment with high prices led to the return of Donald Trump to the White House along with Republican control of the US House and Senate. Trump promised to address inflation. GOP candidates for seats in the Wisconsin Legislature also made high household prices a central talking point.
So why, it can be fairly asked, are we hearing very little about saving some “green” and hearing instead of Trump trying to acquire Greenland? Or taunting Canada about becoming part of the US? Or using the military to seize the Panama Canal—not in any way a current hotbed for international conflict?
In Madison, the priorities also appear to be more than a little out of sync with what was promised in the run-up to November.
“A lot of issues came up on the campaign trail,” said Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), Assembly Minority Leader on UpNorthNews Radio. “I knocked a lot of doors. I heard about addressing costs for working families, about education, the environment, supporting our kids and our elderly folks. You know what I didn’t hear one time? ‘I want you to take that state law on Voter ID and put that into the Wisconsin Constitution.’”
And yet, the first order of business in both the Assembly and Senate was to rush through a proposed amendment enshrining a Republican-led law that makes it harder for some people to vote. That’s not conjecture—that’s the testimony from someone in the room in 2011, when legislative Republicans enacted one of the most restrictive laws in the country. Now, unable to override a veto from Gov. Tony Evers, they want to rush it into the state constitution.
It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that’ll bring down the price of eggs. So what does a rushed vote on voter suppression in Madison have in common with our NATO allies condemning Trump’s interest in taking possession of Greenland? What do both issues have in common with inflation?
They demonstrate the lack of any serious desire to keep their promises to voters. Much like the way “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke in the first Trump administration, a quip about “the price of eggs” will probably become a running gag here in round two. We’re also still waiting on Trump’s “big, beautiful” healthcare plan—still just “concepts of a plan” after all these years.
The best advice for dealing with the changes coming next week is to pay very little attention to the sideshows —the brash rhetoric, the social media taunting, the endless stream of fact-checking— and keep coming back to one fair question: Are they keeping their promises, especially about family affordability? Chances are whatever issue is grabbing attention is designed to take attention away from the lack of progress on things that matter back home. Each sideshow can likely be framed with these words from Rep. Neubauer:
“There are a lot of important issues that the people of Wisconsin have asked us to address. This is just not one of them.”
