Republican-Backed Constitutional Amendments Take US Backwards, Deny Hard Truths

Madison, WI – Facing the prospect of being out of power in the Wisconsin Legislature for the first time in over a decade and a half, Wisconsin Republicans are once again seeking to amend our Wisconsin Constitution to avoid the Governor’s veto on a trio of regressive policies that stand in denial of the hard truths facing our state. With today’s action in the State Senate, at least two of the three will head to voters for final approval on November 3. All three should be rejected.

Senate Joint Resolution 116

AJR 116 would amend our Constitution to forbid a governor from using partial veto authority to create or increase any tax or fee. Republicans argue that Governor Evers did this when he used his partial veto to authorize local school districts to raise revenue limits by $325 per pupil per year through 2425. However, this simply gave local school districts the ability to affirm the will of their constituents to raise their property taxes to meet this revenue threshold. It did not by itself cause a tax or fee increase. Moreover, if the Republican-led legislature had provided sufficient state aid to our public schools, property tax support for public schools would have actually dropped each year.

There’s also the question of legislative intent. If the Republican-controlled legislature had intended to repeal the automatic $325 annual increase to per-pupil revenue limits, they could have done so when crafting the 2025-27 State Budget. They chose not to. So what would this amendment actually do? It would make it harder for any future governor to right the wrongs of any legislature that fails to provide sufficient revenues to meet our shared priorities – education-related or otherwise.

Assembly Joint Resolution 10

AJR 10 would forbid public officials from closing places of worship during a public health emergency. I don’t know what kind of religion would deliberately endanger its followers by holding large, in-person gatherings during a deadly disease outbreak. Evidently the Wisconsin Council of Churches doesn’t either, as they voiced multiple concerns with this proposed amendment.

None of us want to be in a position to prevent large, meaningful gatherings of our neighbors from taking place, and thanks to virtual meeting technology, we don’t have to. We do have a responsibility as government officials to preserve the lives of our constituents to the degree that we can. AJR 10 prevents public health officers from doing their jobs, endangering countless lives in any future pandemic. To date, Wisconsin has lost nearly 19,000 lives to COVID-19. How many more might be lost in a future pandemic if this constitutional amendment passes?

Assembly Joint Resolution 102

AJR 102 bows to the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion fervor of the MAGA-verse by preventing any government program in Wisconsin from facing reality and attempting to reverse our state’s shameful racial, ethnic, and gender disparities. It exists in a fantasy world where the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and xenophobia no longer hold any sway over the realities of our neighbors’ lives.

In reality, Wisconsin continues to be among the worst places in the nation to raise a Black child, and has one of the worst racial disparities in incarceration, educational attainment, median income, infant mortality, entrepreneurship rate, and life expectancy.

We’ve already seen what happens in our universities when race-blind admissions processes are implemented, as the U.S. Supreme Court required through their 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. According to an Associated Press analysis of 20 selective colleges and universities in 2025, including Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Tulane, and Yale, only one (Smith College) enrolled a larger percentage of Black first-year students than it did before the decision. At Princeton and others, Black first-year enrollment dropped nearly 50% to as low as 2% of the overall freshman class at those institutions. Wisconsin was no exception to this unfortunate trend, with our flagship UW-Madison campus seeing Black freshman enrollment drop from 3% to just 2.1% in 2024.

Either we accept that some groups are just going to have worse life outcomes because of their race, gender, or ethnicity, or we need to be able to take steps to study and address these disparities. This constitutional amendment will make addressing disparities significantly harder to achieve.

Wisconsin Republicans continue to ignore the greatest problems facing our neighbors – things like out of control healthcare costs, rising grocery prices, high property taxes, and financially strained public schools. Instead, they would rather limit the governor’s power, stop public health officials from doing their jobs, or make it harder for people from historically disadvantaged groups to achieve their dreams.

Republicans don’t have the votes to put these three regressive policies into law on their own. They need voters to buy into their fringe theory of government in November. It’s up to those of us who believe in opportunity and fairness across our state to stop them.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.