Vos ‘hopes’ Michael Gableman gets disbarred for 2020 election review actions

Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos says he hopes former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is disbarred for going “off the rails” during the 2020 election investigation he hired him to lead.

Vos’ comment comes after a state courts regulator recommended sanctions against Gableman for withholding information in court filings, disparaging a judge and giving false statements to court investigators.

During an interview that aired Sunday on WISN-TV, Vos, R-Rochester, was asked about a list of ethical violations the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation accused Gableman of committing during his 2020 election review. Vos didn’t mince words and called the former justice “an embarrassment to all lawyers in Wisconsin.”

“I certainly hope Michael Gableman loses his law license,” Vos said. “I hope he goes back to work at Home Depot, where he was working prior to working for us.”

It was Vos who hired Gableman to lead the “Office of Special Counsel” in 2021, which was charged with reviewing the state’s 2020 election practices and results. 

Vos announced the hire in 2021 at the annual Republican Party of Wisconsin state convention. It came one day after President-elect Trump accused Vos and other GOP legislative leaders in Wisconsin of “working hard to cover up election corruption” amid his false claims that his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden was the result of voter fraud.

On Sunday, Vos acknowledged his role in putting Gableman in charge.

“I tried to find the person that I thought was best qualified,” Vos said. “If you can’t trust a former Supreme Court justice to follow the law and do the right thing, I don’t really know how much different we could have done.”

The Office of Lawyer Regulation complaint, filed last week, spans 10 counts that accuse Gableman of violating rules of conduct for attorneys. Those include submitting court filings aimed at compelling mayors in Green Bay and Madison to testify about the 2020 election without telling a judge his team had agreed to wave depositions in exchange for documents from those cities. The complaint also states Gableman violated Wisconsin’s open records law, pursued personal interests outside the scope of his investigation and gave false statements to court system investigators.

Any sanctions against Gableman would have to come from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which is currently controlled by a majority of liberal justices.

Gableman has fallen out of favor with Vos ever since the former justice endorsed a Republican running against the speaker in 2022.

Vos predicts Republicans will keep Assembly majority through 2030 

When also asked about Wisconsin’s Nov. 5 election, Vos was bullish, saying that Republicans winning 54 of 99 Assembly seats bodes well for the party in future elections.

This past election was the first held under new legislative voting maps drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and passed by Republican lawmakers. The new maps were enacted in February, after the state Supreme Court’s liberal majority ruled prior maps, drawn by Republican lawmakers, were unconstitutional. 

Vos accused Evers of gerrymandering the new maps and said because Republicans were still able to win a majority of Assembly seats, he’s “very confident” they’ll keep their majority in that chamber through 2030.

“I think the Democrats are going to have to get used to the idea that even though they outspent us two to one, they were not successful,” Vos said. “We have a better ground game, better candidates, ultimately a better message, and I think that’s going to resonate for the rest of the decade.”

In the Wisconsin Senate, Democrats won four competitive seats, setting up races for control of both chambers in 2026.

Vos: Eliminating retirement income tax his ‘top priority’

Looking ahead to the upcoming legislative session, Vos laid out his vision for spending down Wisconsin’s $4.6 billion budget surplus. He dismissed an $855 million budget increase requested by the Universities of Wisconsin and $4 billion in new spending proposed by Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Secretary Jill Underly.

Instead, Vos said he wants to see the surplus go toward tax cuts. In particular, Vos said his top priority is to eliminate any taxes on retirement income for seniors. Republican lawmakers included that and other income tax cut proposals in the last budget, the bulk of which were vetoed by Evers.

Vos said cutting the retirement income tax is “relatively easy to do” and the proposal vetoed by Evers would only apply to the first $75,000 of a retirees annual income.

“So we’re not talking about millionaires and billionaires,” Vos said. “It’s average middle income people who have two retirements.” 

Vos also said he would like to see legislation to “force” state employees back into their offices “at least three or four days a week.”

“I think we need to look at how state government functions, and one of the reasons that we have not had the services we want to deliver is because a lot of employees aren’t working, or they’re working only from home and not doing it very well with little supervision,” Vos said. “So, I would love for us to be able to say, hey, if we giving more money to agencies, we need to make sure we’re actually performing.”

In a statement, Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback pushed back on Vos’ comments about state employees.

“State workers don’t need a lecture in productivity from the guy who led the least-active full-time Legislature in America during the worst economic crisis in a decade,” Cudaback said. “If the speaker is looking for people who ‘aren’t doing work very well,’ it seems his branch of government would be a great place to start.”