Author: Wisconsin Examiner

Two National Rifle Association affiliates made up to $35 million in illegal campaign contributions in the form of coordinated communications efforts to the GOP Senate campaigns of Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to a lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the Giffords gun safety organization. The suit alleges that the gun rights group used shell corporations to improperly aid the Republican lawmakers in 2018. Also included were Josh Hawley of Arkansas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and...

Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling’s recommendation of criminal charges against five Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) officials, stemming from sensationalized allegations about “possible” voting fraud in a Racine County nursing home and “possible” widespread, statewide fraud in the 2020 elections, are little more than a baseless, hyper-partisan attack on legal and approved election procedures made by a highly partisan elected official. Further, the Republican politicians who have rushed to judgment and embraced these questionable allegations and called for resignations of WEC staff and commissioners are highly irresponsible. Their inflammatory statements only serve to further sow seeds of distrust in democracy...

Organizations allied with Latino and immigrant communities are keeping up the pressure on the Biden administration and Democrats to deliver on immigration reform on October 28. The immigrant workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera organized a rally outside the office of Senator Tammy Baldwin in Milwaukee, shutting down the street. Participants, including Voces de la Frontera Executive Director Christine Neumann-Ortiz, sat in the street after covering the road in large banners. “Senator Baldwin and Democrats in the House must champion this issue and urge President Biden, Vice President Harris, and their Democratic colleagues in the U.S. Senate to...

For outreach volunteers and housing advocates at the organization Street Angels, the numbers of unhoused people in Milwaukee is creating anxiety about the coming winter. As the group conducts its nightly outreach missions, handing out supplies and gathering raw data on encounters, volunteers have reached a troubling conclusion. The group is encountering larger numbers of unhoused people than ever before, often in barely visible places. Street Angels first began gathering data on the group’s nightly outreach missions in July 2018. “It isn’t an easy task,” Dan Grellinger, the Angels’ data administrator and a board member, said during an October...

Prison inmates around the U.S. are getting the chance to do something that was almost unheard of a generation ago, pursue a college degree while behind bars and with financial support from the federal government. Inmates in 42 states and Washington DC can now get federal grants to work with colleges and universities to earn trade certifications, associate’s degrees and even bachelor’s degrees. And the programs are expected to become even more popular, thanks to a bipartisan effort to let prisoners use federal Pell Grants to help pay for higher education classes while incarcerated. A grant expansion announced by...