Just a few years after President Donald Trump backed a primary challenger against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the Rochester Republican says he and the president are “tight.”
Vos, the longest-serving speaker in Wisconsin’s history who was also the target of two failed recall attempts mounted by Trump supporters last year, said Tuesday there are “great things that are happening in Washington, D.C. … no matter who you voted for in November.”
“I am a team player,” Vos told a WisPolitics forum in Madison. “The president is the president. It is good for Wisconsin to have Republicans who have relationships with him.”
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The comments from Vos about Trump were hardly a surprise, but they followed years of tension between the two GOP leaders that nearly resulted in Vos losing his job.
In 2022, Trump backed Republican Adam Steen in his bid to defeat Vos, calling the speaker a “RINO,” short for Republican In Name Only, on social media and on the campaign trail. Vos narrowly escaped the primary before easily winning that year’s general election.
Trump regularly criticized Vos for not doing more to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, a step election law experts said was both unconstitutional and impossible. And after the 2022 midterms didn’t go as well for Republicans as they’d hoped, Vos urged the party to move on from Trump.
On Tuesday, Vos declined to criticize the president, saying Democrats were blowing his administration’s sweeping spending cuts out of proportion.
“I want to make sure that the good things that he is doing have a direct benefit for the people of Wisconsin,” Vos said. “And ultimately, I think we all benefit from them.”
Vos rips Evers’ prison budget
Over the hour-long event, Vos also criticized Gov. Tony Evers’ recent prison overhaul proposal, threw support behind a state superintendent challenger and hinted at upcoming GOP tax cut proposals.
The event comes a week after Evers unveiled his $119 billion budget proposal, which Vos immediately said would be mostly “dead on arrival.” The Evers plan included about $2 billion in mixed cuts to some sales and income taxes, as well as increased taxes on millionaires.
On Tuesday, Vos said that Republicans would not support any form of tax increase and were beginning to plan their own standalone tax cut legislation that they hoped to pass before the budget is signed, which is expected to take place this summer.
“We have some tax reductions that we can do, which I think will help drive the economy and actually help pay for themselves, versus just doing an across-the-board cut where we don’t have the same dynamic impact on the economy,” he said. “I want everybody who lives in Wisconsin to say, ‘I’m going to get some kind of tax relief,’ because we are all dealing with the inflationary costs now.”
Vos also blasted Evers’ corrections budget proposal, which calls for $535 million to close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, convert the troubled Waupun Correctional Institution into a “vocational village” for incarcerated people, change the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake juvenile facilities into a men’s facility and construct a new juvenile facility in Dane County.
Vos criticized the way Evers’ unveiled the plan, days before his biennial budget address and without consulting GOP leadership, and the way Evers described the proposal as a “domino effect” where each step is contingent on the one before.
“Imagine that you are part of a government where it is divided between two sides, and one side comes out and says, ‘In secret, I have developed this perfect budget that can’t be changed, because it’s so awesome. Everything has to be adopted, just like I proposed it,’” Vos said.
Vos said that he agrees with the goal of closing the Green Bay prison but that Republicans will craft their own prisons plan.
“[Evers] has one way of operating, which is his way or the highway,” Vos said. “So, I have a feeling that those of us who have an interest in some kind of corrections reform will get together, we will come up with our own package and we will present it to the governor and say, ‘Here it is.’ That’s what we’re going to end up doing.”
Speaker backs Kinser for state superintendent
A proponent of school choice, Vos said he’d support Brittany Kinser to be the next state superintendent. Kinser and incumbent Department of Public Instruction head Jill Underly recently emerged from a three-way primary as the top two vote-getters and will face off on the April 1 ballot.
Vos praised Kinser, who has received campaign support from the state Republican Party.
“She’s for school choice. She actually wants accountability in schools, and she’s willing to work with the Legislature,” Vos said.
Vos has previously said he won’t support increases in K-12 spending without changes in accountability standards. That’s setting up a contentious conversation around school funding this budget season, with Evers calling for $3.1 billion in new funding for schools.
Evers also called for $850 million in new funds for the Universities of Wisconsin system, which he said would be the largest two-year increase in funding in the system’s history. Vos said he “can’t imagine” that Republicans will support increasing UW funding without new accountability measures.
“There is room for compromise if the university wants to step up and say we are willing to take increased accountability and increased focus on making sure that they do what the state of Wisconsin taxpayers want,” he said. “But if it’s just, ‘Give us more so we can do more of the same,’ I think that’s going to be a tough sell.”
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