Conservatives in Wisconsin need to win a state supreme court election to prevent Scott Walker’s Act 10 union reforms from being overturned.
Don’t worry, you did not mistakenly click on an editorial from 2011, when conservatives were in almost the exact same position. Fourteen years later, the Left is still mad about Act 10, and Wisconsin voters must elect Brad Schimel to the supreme court on April 1 to preserve it.
It has been so long since these reforms came into effect that David Prosser, the conservative justice who won that 2011 supreme court election, is no longer alive. The Wisconsin supreme court ruled that Act 10 was constitutional in 2014. Challenging the law again was futile until 2023 when progressives retook a 4–3 majority on the court.
Almost immediately after that, the unions filed their lawsuit. Act 10 exempted some public-safety workers, so the unions argued it was unconstitutional because it denied all workers equal protection under the law. Never mind that this argument was already made in federal court in 2013. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the entire law and ruled that “distinguishing between public safety unions and general employee unions may have been a poor choice, but it is not unconstitutional.”
But the unions had shopped for the right venue for their new case, putting it before Dane County circuit court judge Jacob Frost, who dutifully ruled Act 10 unconstitutional last year. Frost was appointed to the court by sitting Democratic Governor Tony Evers and — far worse for judicial impartiality — had signed the recall petition against Walker over Act 10 in 2011.
It’s appalling that this law, already litigated countless times in the courts and at the ballot box, could still be overturned by an activist judge in Madison, the state’s far-left bastion. But that’s where things stand, pending appeal to the state supreme court sometime this year.
Before Act 10, Wisconsin public employees did not contribute a penny to their pensions or health insurance. Act 10 said they had to pay half their pensions and 12.6 percent of their health insurance — still a much better deal than most private-sector workers get. The law also allowed school districts to shop around for health insurance rather than buying from the teachers’-union-run insurance monopoly that union contracts had previously demanded.
These commonsense changes did not cause the quality of public education or other state services to decline, despite unions’ Chicken Little routine saying they would. One academic study even found that students had slightly better test scores and attendance rates in districts that decertified their unions than in ones that kept them. The MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin-based free-market think tank, estimates that Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers $31 billion since it was passed. And Wisconsin has one of the only fully funded pension systems in the country.
Act 10 was a top-to-bottom win for Wisconsin taxpayers, and it was achieved by breaking unions’ power over the state government. They’ll likely get that power back if Brad Schimel doesn’t win the supreme court election.
Schimel was Waukesha County district attorney for eight years before winning election as Wisconsin attorney general in 2014. He has been a Waukesha County circuit court judge since 2019. There’s hardly a better résumé for a state supreme court justice.
He has a proven conservative record of supporting law enforcement, opposing federal overreach, standing for the right to life, and upholding the Constitution. Most importantly, Schimel understands that state governments must be run by governors and legislators, not by public-sector unions.
As we wrote in our 2011 editorial supporting Prosser, “The question to be answered in Wisconsin is: Who works for whom? Do the public employees work for the citizens, or are the citizens mere cattle to be disposed of at the pleasure of the bureaucrats and their union bosses?” Since 2010, Wisconsin voters have repeatedly answered that question in favor of the citizens. They will need to do so once more on April 1 by voting for Brad Schimel for supreme court.