Three years ago, LaTonya Johnson stood on the floor of the Wisconsin Senate and told a big piece of this state exactly what she thinks of it.
“F— the suburbs because they don’t know a goddamn thing about how life is in the city,” the Milwaukee Democrat said on June 28, 2023, at the end of a speech during the state budget debate.
On Thursday, incoming Senate Majority Leader Dianne Hesselbein handed her the most powerful budget job in the Legislature. Johnson will be the Senate co-chair of the Joint Committee on Finance when Democrats take over in January. Reporters say Rep. Tip McGuire of Kenosha will be her Assembly counterpart.
Hesselbein’s announcement says Johnson has “the judgment and leadership to deliver a budget that reflects the needs of this moment in our state’s history.” Judgment. That’s the word they went with.
Let’s be fair about 2023. Johnson was talking about children killed by gun violence in Milwaukee and was angry that Republicans pointed to crime spilling into the suburbs to justify more police money. She later apologized for “those specific words” but stood by the context of her speech.
The context is the problem. Suburban families in places like Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee counties are growing increasingly worried about carjackings, reckless driving, and shootings creeping in, and other crime elements bleeding over from a lawless Milwaukee. She treated their worry as an insult. Now those voters must worry if Johnson’s contempt for them will bleed into the budget.
Suburban taxpayers send plenty of money to Madison, and the Joint Finance co-chairs decide, line by line, where that money goes. They’ve already bailed out her city once. Two weeks before that speech, Johnson voted for the 2023 shared revenue deal, which boosted state aid to local governments and let Milwaukee and Milwaukee County raise their sales taxes. Who pays a lot of that sales tax? People from Brookfield, Mequon and Germantown who come downtown for dinner, a Brewers game or a Bucks game. Sen. Julian Bradley, now the incoming Senate Republican leader, said it plainly that summer: Milwaukee needed “a bailout from the suburbs.”
In an interview with Civic Media, Johnson spun a different story: Milwaukee “was on the verge of bankruptcy, down to our last $96 million of ARPA funds before the sales tax passed. Republicans in control did not bail Milwaukee out.” The sales tax she describes passed a Republican Legislature, and she voted yes. That was the bailout.
Her record on your money gets worse from there. In July 2025, Johnson voted against the state budget, a bipartisan deal with $1.5 billion in income tax cuts. Hesselbein, the leader who promoted her, voted for it.
Now there’s a surplus on the table. Outgoing co-chair Howard Marklein told reporters this week it’s up to Democrats to decide what to do with the state’s $3 billion surplus. Johnson said in that interview: “The state has such a big surplus because we haven’t been financially backed and now our community is feeling the financial burden.” Her top goal is to “put the people back in the budget.”
If you were hoping that surplus might come back as tax relief, don’t hold your breath. Democrats spent this whole campaign talking about affordability. Their first big decision was to give budget-writing to a senator who voted against a $1.5 billion tax cut, says the surplus belongs to “our community,” and once told the suburbs what to do.
She said the suburbs don’t know a thing about life in the city. Starting in January, those suburban voters will learn a lot about her spending and budgeting.
