It’s a long legislative process for a bill to become law. It requires hearings, committee votes, amendments, floor votes, and the Governor’s signature. A recent fact-check by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel confirmed attempts to serve as a gotcha moment for legislative Democrats. According to the Legislative Reference Bureau, last session Republicans held a public hearing on 9 of the 446 bills with a Democrat as the first author. None of those Democratic-led bills became law.
The Democrats will label that as obstruction, but they ought to be grateful that so few of their bills reached that stage.
If those bills had actually been heard, Assembly and Senate Democrats would have spent the session explaining why Wisconsin needs a Sex Workers Bill of Rights, a statewide Styrofoam crackdown, government-run utilities, and a plan to make the state carbon-neutral by 2050. Many of these far-left proposals weren’t meant to build a governing agenda. This was progressive posturing with LRB numbers attached.
Start with the climate theater. Assembly Bill 145, introduced by Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde, D-Milwaukee, and Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, orders the Legislature to pass another bill creating “a viable plan” to cut carbon emissions 52 percent by 2030 and reach carbon-neutral emissions by 2050 — and requires that plan to “maximize the impact … on improving economic and racial equity.” A bill that commands the Legislature to pass a bill is not serious lawmaking. It is a press release designed to brand Republicans as climate villains if they refuse to put Wisconsin’s manufacturing base, farms, and ratepayers on a California-style schedule.
Then came the government-utility grab. Assembly Bill 1211, from Reps. Ryan Clancy, Francesca Hong, and Darrin Madison, would have created a grant program forcing the Public Service Commission to cover 50 percent of the cost whenever a city or village decides to build or buy a public utility. The money comes from a sum-sufficient appropriation, legislative-speak for an open tap. No cap. No sunset. Just a standing invitation for municipal socialism with Madison writing half the check.
The cultural bills were worse. Assembly Bill 1193 would have repealed Wisconsin’s adult prostitution statutes and created a “sex workers’ bill of rights,” complete with minimum-wage and hour protections, workers’ compensation, health benefits, and bans on discrimination in housing and health care because they sell sex. The authors were members of the socialist caucus: Clancy, Hong, Madison, Rep. Silvia Cruz, and Rep. Angelino Tenorio. That is not a mainstream Wisconsin proposal. It is the kind of idea that plays on campus and dies at the supper table.
Assembly Bill 782 would have banned restaurants and retail food businesses from serving food or drinks in foam polystyrene — Styrofoam cups and clamshells — with a $500 fine attached. Out-of-state sealed containers and raw-meat packaging got a carve-out; the supper club’s to-go foam did not. Democrats framed it as environmental hygiene, but in reality it would have been an extreme punishment for small restaurants already operating on thin margins.
The spending list was just as detached. Assembly Bill 186 would have spent $250,000 on a Department of Workforce Development study of a “guaranteed employment” grant program — taxpayer-funded jobs at $20 an hour, with at least 100 days of eight-hour shifts, routed through public agencies and NGOs in fields including climate-change mitigation and criminal-legal reform. Thanks to DOGE, the Trump administration has shed light on and ended the taxpayer funding to left-wing NGO pipeline. Wisconsin shouldn’t build a new one.
Assembly Bill 731 would have required free inmate and jail communications — at least 180 minutes of phone time, 60 minutes of video, and 100 texts a week — and appropriated about $19.4 million over two years ($4.98 million in 2025-26 and $14.37 million in 2026-27) to pay for it. Given what we know about David Crowley’s program in Milwaukee County jail, imagine the threats, abuse, and misuse that we’d see in a statewide program.
Other proposals piled on: a $4 million grant program to train school counselors in LGBTQ ideology, a $50 million climate-jobs corps, taxpayer credits for e-bikes, a 20 percent “death tax,” abortion up to birth, and a rewrite of homicide law that would eliminate life sentences and cap murder at 25 years.
None of that is a secret. The bills are on the Legislature’s website. Democrats introduced them, put their names on them, and then treated the lack of hearings as proof the system is broken. The Journal Sentinel’s count understates how little of this package was ever going to survive contact with reality. The nine bills that did get a hearing were the least radioactive items — menopause education, AED grants for child-care centers, free state-park access for veterans and Gold Star families. Even those did not become law as Democratic-first-author bills.
Voters should not mistake the lack of hearings for a permanent firewall. Democrats are chasing a legislative trifecta in November. If they get all three, last session’s buried bills are not a leftover wish list. They are the tip of a far-left progressive iceberg headed straight at Wisconsin: higher taxes, government-run utilities, abortion to birth, weaker criminal penalties, identity politics in the statute books, and an energy policy written to please Madison activists instead of the people who pay the bills.
