🔓Repost: The end of the Vos Era, finally
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The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
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Over the last 15 years, the most consequential politician in the state of Wisconsin has been Robin Vos. In an Assembly floor speech on the afternoon of Thursday, Feb. 19, he announced he will not be seeking re-election in November, retiring from the Assembly at the end of his term.
For the good people of Wisconsin, this is true cause for celebration.
The enormity of what Vos’ pending retirement means for state politics in Wisconsin cannot be overstated. Vos is the longest-serving Assembly Speaker in state history, and his tenure has spanned two multi-term governors, a time of tremendous political upheaval in the state. Pull any thread — be it in the Walker years of trifecta Republican control, or in the Evers era of divided government — and you’ll find your way back to Robin Vos.
That is not a compliment. The era he’s presided over has been destructive and damaging for Wisconsin, and he’s been at the heart of it all. Wisconsin is unequivocally worse off for his years of leadership in the state. His calculating, power-consolidation-at-all-costs approach has held the state back time and time again. His clear disdain for his opposition, lacking even a baseline level of respect, is abhorrent. The way he’s deployed a politics of dismissive cruelty to blue cities like Milwaukee has been repulsive. His stubborn refusal to act at a moment of genuine crisis in 2020 was cataclysmic, and is one of endless examples when he’s put politics over people. He’s been a singular force against good governance throughout his time as Assembly Speaker. The way he operates is the antithesis of everything politics should be.
So often when it comes to the actions of Republican Party politicians of this era, there’s a question of whether it’s malevolence or incompetence behind their decisions. All too often, it’s both. For Vos, it has always been the former. He understands the ins and outs of state government as well as anyone, has continually demonstrated that he knows exactly how each lever of power can be pulled, and yet, he chooses the unabashedly malicious path he’s taken. In many ways, this makes his actions all the worse.
Just look at his record. In an October 2024 column, I listed the myriad of ways the Assembly Speaker has acted against the interests of the people of Wisconsin and ripped this state apart at the seams.
There was the Michael Gableman saga, where Vos empowered the former state Supreme Court justice to conduct a sprawling, off-the-rails, scandal-plagued, multi-million dollar review of the 2020 election, and produced no evidence of election fraud. There was the aforementioned trip to Brazil during the special session on child care, and the myriad of gavel-in, gavel-outs on issues from abortion to gun violence prevention to criminal justice reform to education funding. There’s the constant refusal to expand Medicaid, making Wisconsin the only state in the Midwest to do so, depriving the state of billions of dollars and making health care access worse in the process. There was his action in singularly blocking a bill to expand health care coverage for new moms. There was his stubborn refusal to act on the outdated and unclear 1849 abortion ban that went into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned. There was the lame-duck session where Vos and legislative Republicans stripped powers from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. There were the threats to impeach new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she even heard a case. There was the tremendous failure of the Foxconn project, located right in his own Assembly district, not just a one-off failure, but the culminated goal of the entire right-wing takeover of Wisconsin’s government. There was the refusal to fund lead pipe replacement because he said too much money would go to Milwaukee. There were the many laws passed benefiting landlords and undermining renters (while he himself is a landlord). There were the years of refusal to address the state’s broken shared revenue system, coupled with the refusal to allow Milwaukee to generate new revenue, defunding local government in the city and in communities all over the state. There’s the endless refusal to legalize even medical marijuana in a reasonable way, much less decriminalize it for recreational use. There was that ridiculous pandemic election stunt, where he showed up to work the polls dressed head-to-toe in personal protective equipment. There’s been the constant, regular overnight sessions, with votes happening in the dead of night, or the countless number of times he’s kept members of the opposition party in the dark on when they’d need to show up to the Capitol next, or the endless stories of disrespectful behavior. There’s the decision to make every other year one where the legislature takes a nine-month break from legislating. The Gerrymander. Act 10. On and on and on. This is a long paragraph, and it just scratches the surface of the depths of what Vos has done in his time as Assembly Speaker.
The 24 hours that preceded his retirement announcement seemed quite fitting, and emblematic of the Vos approach. He prepared to hold the final floor session of the year in mid-February, rushing to meet the imaginary deadline he himself set to finish the session early and take a nine-month break from legislating. Two spotlight bills — on expanding healthcare for new moms and for coverage for additional breast cancer screenings — were not on the agenda, despite having overwhelming bipartisan support and having passed the Senate. Vos had buried them in an obscure committee, and was dug in on obstructing them. But Assembly Democrats and Democratic leader Greta Neubauer went all out to force a vote on both, tying each to every last bill on the agenda. Republicans left to caucus, and after several hours, Majority Leader Tyler August and Vos himself were spotted at a fundraiser at the Madison Club, one hosted by the Jobs First Coalition where his wife, Michelle Litjens Vos, is the top fundraiser. Leaving mid-session to fundraise with lobbyists instead of taking a vote to help new mothers is just perfectly, on-the-nose quintessential Vos — because that’s who he really works for.
His legacy from a more national perspective might be more remembered in the context of his rocky relationship with President Donald Trump — some of the headlines on Vos’ retirement announcement reflected on how he “clashed” with Trump amid the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But even that overlooks the role Vos played in appeasing and often fueling the election deniers who sought to toss hundreds of years of American democracy in the trash. He may have angered Trump into some fiery comments — and prompted him to support a primary challenger, inviting vitriol from the far right — by not doing the impossible when it came to the election results. But it was Vos who was calling committee hearings to question the results just days after the election, and it was Vos who hired Gableman for his sprawling, anti-democracy review of 2020 in the first place. And while the Assembly Speaker has since characterized hiring Gableman as his biggest mistake he’s ever made, Vos still deserves endless criticism for trying to play both sides, dragging our politics into the gutter along the way, never truly taking accountability for the mess he created. He knows better and yet he still does worse – that’s the Robin Vos way.
While Vos’ time in leadership stretches to the early 2010s, Vos’ reign in many ways crested in the years post-Walker into the 2020s, when he was elevated to being the most powerful Republican in the state and was routinely at odds with Democratic governor Tony Evers, working to obstruct him at seemingly every turn. The Republican approach in Madison then turned from Walker’s dim malignance to Vos’ calculated malice. Because of how he had consolidated power in the legislative branch — and because of the ultra-gerrymandered maps that cemented Republican control and made him and his caucus unaccountable to voters — he was still the one holding just about all of the cards in state politics.
It’s been the way he’s played that hand that’s been truly shameful. Wisconsin politics are broken, and if you were to write a list of the reasons why, Robin Vos’ name is at the very top. He is chiefly behind the toxicity, the gridlock, the incessant disrespect and dismissiveness of anyone not on his side that has poisoned this state for a generation.
It is my sincere hope that we can turn the page on the despicable Vos era the moment he heads for the exits for one final time, and that 2027 can bring a new dawn in Wisconsin. Because the greatest obstacle to progress in this state has been Robin Vos, and he is going to be gone from his perch as the most powerful lawmaker in the state. A top priority for whoever takes the reins next should be to rip out, root and stem, as much of the Vos era as possible.
In his final speech, Vos said something that suggests he still doesn’t get it. “We debate in public, we answer to our voters. We live with the consequences of our actions, right or wrong,” he said.
This may be who Robin Vos imagines himself to be, but it is not who he is. He is no statesman to be revered; he’s an arsonist unwilling to acknowledge he’s the one holding the matches and gasoline.
He hasn’t lived with the consequences of his actions or answered to voters really at all. He’s worked to undermine the will of the people and bend the political universe to his own benefit time and time again. When Walker lost in 2018, he moved to strip the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general of their powers. We all know the mess he created with the Gableman affair. When Janet Protasiewicz won in 2023, flipping the balance of power on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, he threatened to impeach her before she had ever even heard a case. He routinely blocked legislation that had overwhelming support. He rarely let any Democratic bills have so much as a public hearing. He stood in the way of any kind of healthy debate, acting in midnight sessions and going months without acting at a time of genuine crisis. These are not the actions of a man who respects democracy and the will of the voters, they are that of a power-hungry wanna-be tyrant who has snarled and scrambled and tried to snuff out anything in his way. He did this with power that was never truly earned, but built on some of the most egregiously gerrymandered maps of any state legislature in the nation.
Robin Vos is less the shadow governor he seems to imagine himself to be, more a mad king who Wisconsinites have never truly supported.
It’s fitting, too, that he’ll be heading for the exits just in time for the first election to be fully held following the fall of Vos’ gerrymandered maps. The Assembly’s last election happened entirely under the new maps, but only half of the Senate was on the ballot in November 2024. The other half is up in November 2026, and this is the first time in a generation that Democrats will have the opportunity to win control of the state legislature — Assembly and Senate.
Perhaps Robin Vos is not really built for a world where he actually has to compete on merit, be accountable to the voters, and not have the game board tilted in his favor. With the first fully post-Gerrymander election looming in November, I suppose you could say Robin Vos chose a moment to retire when he would be incredibly safe to go out.
There are reports indicating that Vos is still going to be active in running the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee (RACC) for the 2026 fall elections, which means there’s still time to give Vos the electoral comeuppance he has long evaded through years of gerrymandered maps. If voters flip the Assembly this fall, Vos will be handing the Speaker gavel over to a Democrat in his final act in state government. That’s the ending he deserves.
For over 20 years in office and more than 13 years as Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos has represented the worst of our politics. Turning the page on this regrettable era couldn’t happen soon enough. Wisconsin will be better off once Robin Vos is no longer in power. Good riddance.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he and the publication joined Civic Media, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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