Rather than accede to Trump’s demands, the Wisconsin assembly speaker focused on his duties to his party, his legislature, and the Constitution.
Rather than accede to Trump’s demands, the Wisconsin assembly speaker focused on his duties to his party, his legislature, and the Constitution.
R obin Vos is not the kind of politician you’d want to get a beer with. He’s not particularly warm and has the charisma of a small-town school-board member. But he’s the kind of politician who would want to get a beer with you — not as part of some corny, man-of-the-people shtick, but just because he enjoys a good beer. And he’d rather drink beer than have it dumped on him, as a left-wing protester did in 2011 during the protests against Republicans over Scott Walker’s public-sector-union reforms.
Vos is a Wisconsin guy, born and raised, and has been speaker of the assembly, the lower house of Wisconsin’s legislature, since 2013. He was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee over phone calls he had with Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. His interview with the committee, published yesterday, shows he isn’t the villain some make him out to be.
On the left, Vos has been villainized because he has been an effective leader of assembly Republicans in an extremely competitive swing state. Despite Wisconsin statewide elections often coming down to one or two percentage points, Republicans have held a sizable majority in the assembly since Vos became speaker, and currently hold a 61–38 advantage. That’s largely due to the state’s political geography, with Democratic voters highly concentrated in a few areas and Republican voters more evenly spread throughout the state.
Vos is a pretty standard-issue state-level Republican. He wants to cut your taxes and make it easier to start a business, and he supports right-to-work and voter-ID laws. But to some on the left, he’s an enemy of democracy. They cite claims of gerrymandering and legislation to shift some powers from the governor’s office to the legislature to make their case. As it relates to Donald Trump’s claims to having won the 2020 election, outgoing assembly minority leader Gordon Hintz said earlier this year, “The speaker is willing to go along with it because he sees the end game,” and expressed concerns about Vos “selling out democracy.”
When given a chance to actually sell out democracy, though, Vos repeatedly and without hesitation refused to do so. After Donald Trump narrowly lost Wisconsin in 2020, he talked on the phone numerous times with Vos, as he did with other officials in states he lost, hinting that he wanted them to find a way to nullify the election results. Vos was clear, both in private and in public, that he would not even entertain the idea.
In July, he told Milwaukee’s ABC affiliate about Trump’s phone calls: “He makes his case, which I respect. He would like us to do something different in Wisconsin. I explained that it’s not allowed under the constitution. . . . I can’t just snap my fingers or wish that I could have somehow decertified the election. It’s unconstitutional, which is why it’s never been done.”
He told the January 6 committee the same thing. “I informed President Trump that under the Constitution there was nothing we could do,” he said. When asked if he was part of any discussions to appoint an alternative slate of electors, one of the crackpot theories Trump’s boosters had discussed, Vos replied, “None. Nope.” He said he never interacted with Rudy Giuliani or anyone working for him. He said he told Trump that a Wisconsin supreme court ruling from earlier this year about ballot drop-boxes would not in any way affect the results of the 2020 election. “I could sense he was not satisfied with my answers. But that’s the way it is,” he said.
Vos told the committee that he and other legislators had a meeting with John Eastman and other activists where Eastman argued they could decertify the results. “I listened and at the end explained again that that was not what I understood [to be true] nor possible,” Vos said. Also participating in that meeting, according to Vos, were Rick Esenberg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and Jim Troupis, a Trump attorney. Vos said both men made clear that decertification would be unconstitutional and could not happen.
Vos’s steadfast refusal made him a villain to some on the right. He had authorized an investigation into election irregularities, which was likely a mistake. It kept the issue at the center of state politics, turned up nothing to suggest significant wrongdoing (which should have been expected), and wound up a waste of time and money. Trump endorsed a primary challenger in Vos’s district. Vos defeated him. After defeating him, he fired Michael Gableman, the former supreme court justice who was leading the election investigation. Vos’s primary opponent then ran as a write-in candidate in the general election, again with Trump’s endorsement. Vos defeated him again. He then removed the Republican chairwoman of the assembly’s elections committee, who had lost the trust of other legislators by obsessing over the 2020 election.
If you’re wondering what any of this had to do with the events of January 6, 2021, so was Vos. He sued the committee in an attempt to block the subpoena, since he had nothing to do with the attack on the Capitol. He lost that case, but the interview now published demonstrates that he was not even asked about the attack on the Capitol at all.
He reiterated numerous times in the interview that he wants to move forward, while Trump wants to look backward. He said that the way to address issues stemming from the 2020 election was not to listen to Trump’s grievance-mongering, but rather to pass better election laws and ensure that Republicans are in office to sign them. It’s clear from Vos’s statements that he views Trump as a sideshow distracting from the job of conservative policy-making. He recently said he would try as hard as he can to make sure Trump is not the nominee in 2024.
Robin Vos’s way out of Trump’s grasp was to focus on his duties to his party, the legislative body he leads, and the state and federal constitutions. He did so with a level of Wisconsin politeness that is uncommon, but Republicans around the country can and should follow his example.