Congress appropriated $500M for workers. Democrats can’t agree on whether to spend it.

Congress appropriated nearly $500 million last year to help American workers whose jobs have been sent overseas. But two powerful Democrats disagree over whether that money can or should be spent, leaving relief for tens of thousands of workers in limbo.

The disagreement between Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is just the latest symptom of congressional gridlock on trade policy that has allowed multiple programs — from worker relief funds to tariff exemption programs for manufacturers and developing nations — to expire in recent years. Ending the relief payments would deal a blow to President Joe Biden’s trade policy that has sought to make international commerce easier on middle- and low-income Americans.

The dispute over the funding for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) — a Department of Labor program that provides income support, job retraining and other relief for victims of outsourcing — centers on language in the omnibus spending package that Congress passed last December. The bill included new funding for TAA, but did not explicitly reauthorize the program, which expired earlier in the year.

According to two Appropriations Committee aides involved in the talks, $500 million in funding was included in the draft in hopes Democrats and Republicans could reach a deal to extend the TAA program, but they failed to do so. In the rush to pass the final bill, the appropriations provision was not altered, and aides felt it was not necessary to do so because the program was not authorized. The aides were granted anonymity to discuss confidential policy negotiations.

While stressing that the senator supports TAA in principle, Murray’s office believes the program remains expired and the money cannot be spent without authorizing language. After the bill was signed and Murray became chair of the Appropriations Committee, she called DOL to relay that information and request the agency not restart processing applications for TAA aid.

“The appropriations bill that passed at the end of the year said the program ended, that’s the way it was written,” Murray said in a brief Capitol Hill interview on Monday. She declined to comment on the language from her own committee allocating nearly $500 million to the program, reiterating that the bill “specifically said that the program was ended” and that “is all I’m going to say.”

Wyden, one of Murray’s senior Democratic colleagues whose committee oversees the TAA program, is challenging that interpretation.

Wyden and House Democrats tried for months to get an agreement with Republicans to authorize the program for another year. Republicans insisted throughout negotiations that the Biden administration would need to commit to new trade talks overseas to get the TAA payments restarted — a demand the White House dismissed. Though they never reached a deal on that language, Wyden says that having money appropriated for the program is enough for DOL to reopen TAA again.

“I believe the omnibus extended TAA for a year,” Wyden said in a Capitol Hill interview on Monday, adding he was not aware of Murray’s guidance to DOL. “The text of the law is clear,” he added later. “The Biden administration should use that authority to deliver workers the benefits they are owed.”

DOL declined to weigh in on the legal debate between the senators, but has so far complied with requests from Murray and her staff that the agency keep the program frozen. An agency spokesperson confirmed that the program “remains in termination status” and that DOL “may not conduct new investigations or issue certifications of eligibility for new groups of workers.” A separate fact sheet put out by the agency says more than 24,000 workers have pending applications that DOL cannot investigate.

If lawmakers and DOL do not attempt to use the $500 million, the TAA program will phase out after the remaining workers in the program — roughly 7,000, according to the DOL fact sheet — finish receiving their benefits. Congress could renew the program, potentially in the year-end spending bill, but Republicans have shown no desire to drop their demand for new free trade talks and Biden’s team hasn’t budged either.

The situation is angering labor unions, like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who wrote to DOL earlier this month, saying that “tens of thousands of workers are currently awaiting determinations of their petition for TAA support.” Other labor groups, including the United Steelworkers and AFL-CIO, also sent similar letters.

The issue, say congressional aides involved in the omnibus negotiations, goes back to the year-end crunch to finalize the spending package. As Wyden and trade lawmakers negotiated on TAA, appropriations lawmakers wrote in the $500 million in case lawmakers arrived at a deal to reauthorize it. That deal never materialized, but the $500 million provision was not altered in the rush to finish the package before the winter holidays. The mixup was an “artifact of the timing,” as one Appropriations Committee aide put it, stressing that it was Republican opposition — and not Murray — that ultimately killed the program.

Wyden’s office and the unions say that DOL should push forward regardless and spend the $500 million appropriated to the program, pointing out that executive agencies often spend appropriated funds on expired programs without explicit reauthorization. In particular, they point to a footnote in the Government Accountability Office’s guidance on appropriations law that says Congress “appropriates huge sums each year to fund programs with expired authorizations.”

But the Appropriations Committee staff says that argument doesn’t apply to TAA.

“There’s longstanding case law and precedent on this issue about when appropriation is sufficient to extend authorization of the program,” said one committee aide involved in the spending negotiations last year. “Everybody understood ahead of the omnibus that was not the case here.”

Additionally, the aide said the committee would not push DOL to reopen the program because it could poison upcoming spending negotiations with Republicans that need to be completed by the end of this year.

“While not our preferred policy outcome, we will stand by those negotiations,” the committee aide said, “because they are very delicate and we want to have a good process in [fiscal year 2024] as well.”

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Sanders serves strong cup of joe to Starbucks bigwig

After months of steadily amping up pressure on Starbucks and its longtime leader, Howard Schultz, Sen. Bernie Sanders finally got his chance Wednesday to grill the coffee executive over the company's hardball response to union organizing at its stores.

"Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country,” said Sanders (I-Vt.), who heads the Senate committee that handles labor issues, at a hearing where Schultz was the main attraction. "What is outrageous to me is not only Starbucks' anti-union activities and their willingness to break the law, it is their calculated and intentional efforts to stall, stall and stall."

Schultz, who stepped down earlier this month as interim CEO, spent hours defending the company he has steered — off and on — since the 1980s. He repeatedly denied allegations of union busting, trading barbs with Sanders and Democrats in the process, and tried to depict a company worth emulating rather than denigrating.

Here are five takeaways from Wednesday’s hearing:

Starbucks isn't budging

Schultz may no longer be holding the reins, but he made clear he does not believe the company has done anything illegal in its effort to quell a unionization drive that gained steam in 2021 and rippled across hundreds of Starbucks stores in 2022.

“Starbucks Coffee Company unequivocally — and let me set the zone for this very early on — has not broken the law,” Schultz said at the outset of Wednesday’s hearing before repeating variations of that declaration numerous times throughout the proceedings.

The National Labor Relations Board is prosecuting more than 80 complaints, covering 278 unfair labor practice charges, against the company. NLRB judges have handed down a smattering of rulings that Starbucks did break federal law, though the company appears intent on appealing such decisions for as long as it takes.

“We’re confident those allegations will be proven false,” Schultz said. “Starbucks has not broken the law.”

Republicans (reluctantly) came to Starbucks’ defense

GOP members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee members were willing to go to bat for Starbucks, even though the company has allied itself with progressive causes over the years.

“There’s some irony to a non-coffee-drinking Mormon conservative defending a Democrat candidate for president and perhaps one of the most liberal companies in America,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. “That being said, I also think it’s somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.”

(Schultz never ran for president, though he did flirt with the idea in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles. And in 2019 he said he had disaffiliated with the Democratic Party for ideological reasons.)

Romney was one of several Republicans who said they disagreed with some of Starbucks’ political stances but nonetheless felt it was being villainized by Democrats and union supporters.

Schultz: Blunt rhetoric, but no laws were broken

During the hearing, senators of both parties got Schultz to confirm a number of facts about Starbucks and its response to the unionization drive — much of which will eventually make its way into legal filings.

The former CEO confirmed that workers at unionized stores were not extended certain compensation benefits granted to non-union stores, that it has opposed having collective bargaining negotiations done over Zoom and that Schultz told one worker “if you hate the company, you could work somewhere else.”

Schultz said that Starbucks believes labor law prohibits it from unilaterally changing employee compensation at unionized stores and that the company has pushed for in-person talks out of safety concerns for managers involved — though the NLRB has argued otherwise. He also said that his comments to that worker, which were at a company event, may have been “misinterpreted” and were not intended as anti-union intimidation.

He also said that there was nothing wrong with Starbucks telling workers that it believes they would be better off without unionizing.

“We have consistently laid out our preference without breaking any law,” he said.

Unions rile up Mullins

For the second time in a month, first-year Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) got into a spirited back-and-forth during a hearing related to unionization — this time with Sanders.

Mullin accused Sanders of being hypocritical in lambasting the wealth of Schultz and other business leaders when he himself has profited from the American system.

“If you can be a millionaire, why can't Mr. Schultz and other CEOs be millionaires and be honest, too?"

Sanders took issue with Mullin’s estimate of his net worth and said that he had “made more misstatements in a shorter period of time than I have ever heard."

A few weeks earlier Mullin had a testy exchange with Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, and the senator said during that hearing that his disdain for unions was born out of personal experience with how they treated him when they attempted to organize the plumbing business he ran.

Expect to hear a lot more about the NLRB’s fairness

Starbucks has accused staffers at the labor agency of being biased against it and colluding with the union in several elections. An agency official, Rachel Dormon, went to the coffee company with concerns last year and the information she provided has helped it challenge the results of at least one union vote.

“The NLRB is facing its own credibility crisis,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the HELP Committee. “Are NLRB employees weaponizing the agency against American employers to benefit politically connected labor unions?”

The NLRB has denied Starbucks’ allegations, though House Education and the Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) issued a subpoena last week to Dormon for information on the matter.

In the midst of Wednesday's hearing, House Democrats revealed that the NLRB has opened an inquiry into issues surrounding the subpoena. Republicans assailed the probe as an attempt to intimidate Dormon for coming forward, and the development will likely ratchet up tensions between the NLRB and conservative lawmakers.

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Vatican: Pope to be hospitalized for days for lung infection

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis was hospitalized with a lung infection Wednesday after experiencing difficulty breathing in recent days and will remain in the hospital for several days of treatment, the Vatican said.

The 86-year-old pope doesn’t have Covid-19, spokesperson Matteo Bruni said in a statement late Wednesday.

The hospitalization was the first since Francis spent 10 days at the Gemelli in July 2021 to have 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon removed.

It immediately raised questions about Francis’ overall health, and his ability to celebrate the busy Holy Week events that are due to begin this weekend with Palm Sunday.

Bruni said Francis had been suffering breathing troubles in recent days and went to the Gemelli hospital for tests.

“The tests showed a respiratory infection (Covid-19 infection excluded) that will require some days of medical therapy,” Bruni’s statement said.

Francis appeared in relatively good form during his regularly scheduled general audience earlier Wednesday, though he grimaced strongly while getting in and out of the “popemobile.”

Francis had part of one lung removed when he was a young man due to a respiratory infection, and he often speaks in a whisper. But he got through the worst phases of the Covid-19 pandemic without at least any public word of ever testing positive.

Francis had been due to celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend, kicking off the Vatican’s Holy Week observances: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and finally Easter Sunday on April 9. He has canceled all audiences through Friday, but it wasn’t clear whether he could keep the Holy Week plans.

Francis has used a wheelchair for over a year due to strained ligaments in his right knee and a small knee fracture. He has said the injury was healing and been walking more with a cane of late.

Francis also has said he resisted having surgery for the knee problems because he didn’t respond well to general anesthesia during the 2021 intestinal surgery.

He said soon after the surgery that he had recovered fully and could eat normally. But in a Jan. 24 interview with The Associated Press, Francis said his diverticulosis, or bulges in the intestinal wall, had “returned.”

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Police: Nashville shooter fired indiscriminately at victims

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The shooter who killed three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville legally bought seven weapons in recent years and hid the guns from their parents before carrying out the attack by firing indiscriminately at victims and spraying gunfire through doors and windows, police said Tuesday.

The violence Monday at The Covenant School was the latest school shooting to roil the nation and was planned carefully. The shooter had drawn a detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducted surveillance of the building before carrying out the massacre, authorities said.

The suspect, Audrey Hale, 28, was a former student at the school. Hale did not target specific victims — among them three 9-year-olds and the head of the school — but did target “this school, this church building,” police spokesperson Don Aaron said at a news conference Tuesday.

Hale was under a doctor’s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not known to police before the attack, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at the news conference.

If police had been told that Hale was suicidal or homicidal, “then we would have tried to get those weapons,” Drake said. “But as it stands, we had absolutely no idea who this person was or if (Hale) even existed.”

Tennessee does not currently have a “red flag” law, which lets police step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill.

Hale legally bought seven firearms from five local gun stores, Drake said. Three of them were used in Monday’s shooting. Police spokesperson Brooke Reese said Hale bought the guns between October 2020 and June 2022.

Hale’s parents believed their child had sold one gun and did not own any others, Drake said, adding that Hale “had been hiding several weapons within the house.”

Hale’s motive is unknown, Drake said. In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Drake said investigators don’t know what drove Hale but believe the shooter had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Drake, at Tuesday’s news conference, described “several different writings by Hale” that mention other locations and The Covenant School.

Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Justice Department would open an investigation into whether the shooting was a hate crime targeting Christians, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal officials were working with local police to identify a motive.

Police have released videos of the shooting, including edited surveillance footage that shows the shooter’s car driving up to the school, glass doors being shot out and the shooter ducking through one of them.

Additional video, from Officer Rex Engelbert’s bodycam, shows a woman meeting police outside as they arrive and telling them that all the children were locked down, “but we have two kids that we don’t know where they are.”

The woman then directs officers to Fellowship Hall and says people inside had just heard gunshots. Three officers, including Engelbert, search rooms one by one, holding rifles and announcing themselves as police.

The video shows officers climbing stairs to the second floor and entering a lobby area, followed by a barrage of gunfire and an officer yelling twice: “Get your hands away from the gun.” Then the shooter is shown motionless on the floor.

Police identified Engelbert, a four-year member of the force, and Michael Collazo, a nine-year member, as the officers who fatally shot Hale. The White House said President Joe Biden spoke separately Tuesday with Drake, Engelbert and Callazo to thank them for their bravery and quick response.

Police response times to school shootings have come under greater scrutiny after the attack in Uvalde, Texas, in which 70 minutes passed before law enforcement stormed the classroom. In Nashville, police have said 14 minutes passed from the initial call to when the suspect was killed, but they have not said how long it took them to arrive.

Surveillance video shows a time stamp of just before 10:11 a.m., when the attacker shot out the doors. Police said they got the call about a shooter at 10:13 a.m. The edited bodycam footage didn’t include time stamps. A police spokesperson didn’t respond to an email Tuesday asking when they arrived.

During the news conference, Drake did not answer a question directly about how many minutes it took police to arrive. At about 10:24 a.m., 11 minutes after the call was received, officers engaged the suspect, he said.

“There were police cars that had been hit by gunfire. As officers were approaching the building, there was gunfire going off,” Drake said.

Police have given unclear information on Hale’s gender. For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. Later in the day, the police chief said Hale was transgender. After the news conference, Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale identified.

In an email Tuesday, police spokesperson Kris Mumford said Hale “was assigned female at birth. Hale did use male pronouns on a social media profile.” Later Tuesday, at the news conference, Drake referred to Hale with female pronouns.

Authorities identified the dead children as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. The adults were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016. Peak was a substitute teacher, and Hill was a custodian, according to investigators.

Koonce was remembered as someone who would run toward danger, not away from it.

“I guarantee you if there were kids missing (during the shooting), Katherine was looking for them,” friend Jackie Bailey said. “And that’s probably how she got in the way — just trying to do something for somebody else. She would give up her own life in order to save somebody else’s.”

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Hill frustrations simmer over banking chief

Martin Gruenberg is finding himself in an uncomfortable place these days: the target of Republican wrath.

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. this month resolved the biggest bank failure since the financial crisis by bailing out thousands of uninsured depositors at Silicon Valley Bank — then took two weeks to sell the lender in a deal that is projected to cost his agency a record $20 billion.

On Tuesday, at the first congressional hearing on the banking turmoil, where Gruenberg appeared alongside other regulators, GOP lawmakers demanded to know why SVB wasn’t auctioned off more quickly to a private sector bidder, arguing that could have saved further cost, trouble and government involvement. Their frustration with him had already been simmering over his role in undermining his Trump-appointed predecessor, who resigned last year.

“Throughout the course of that weekend I was inundated with phone calls telling me legitimate bidders were being waved off,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told Gruenberg. “If ideology had anything to do with this, this committee is going to be deeply concerned about that.”

For many Republicans, the conflict goes far beyond how Gruenberg and his agency dealt with the California lender. It touches on the role of the federal government itself in steering the economy, with President Joe Biden’s regulators increasingly coming under fire for trying to usurp what GOP lawmakers view as the job of the private market. They also used the opportunity to hit the Biden administration for its crackdown on corporate consolidation across industries.

“When you hear rumors that this process was delayed because the White House doesn’t like mergers in any shape, form, or fashion, it makes you wonder what actually is going on,” said Sen. Tim Scott, the top Republican on the Banking Committee. Scott said a sale would have prevented the government from having to back uninsured depositors, a move that regulators said was necessary because of the threat of runs on other banks.

The FDIC’s moves could reverberate for years to come and have already ignited a heated debate in Congress about whether to expand the public safety net of deposit insurance — a cost that would likely be borne by consumers because banks would pass it along. A key to answering that question will be determining whether Gruenberg’s agency properly considered all options.

Policymakers have pointed to extenuating circumstances that made it difficult to sell the bank quickly, in particular the fact that SVB, a darling of the tech startup industry, unraveled so rapidly.

“This was a very rushed process,” Gruenberg said at the hearing. Also, banks had little time that weekend to get comfortable with SVB’s books, particularly when its borrowers and depositors were so closely intertwined, an FDIC official said.

A Biden administration official also defended Gruenberg against speculation that he wasn’t open to a purchase by a megabank, saying the FDIC chief has made clear that “he didn’t have some kind of bigness criteria.”

As for the administration itself, “our focus in the short term has been on stabilizing the system,” said the official, who was granted anonymity so he could speak more freely,

The epic collapse of SVB has thrust the spotlight on the normally low-profile Gruenberg, bringing to the forefront the battle-scarred perspective of the FDIC chief. He had a front-row seat to the agency’s efforts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when more than 500 banks failed, an experience that in 2019 led him to give a speech that in part reads like a preview of what would eventually go wrong with SVB.

This is, depending on how it’s counted, Gruenberg’s fourth stint atop the FDIC, having been confirmed to the job under President Barack Obama and serving twice as its acting head. His current term was secured by unconventional means: sticking around at the agency after his board term had expired and after his successor, Jelena McWilliams, had already been named by President Donald Trump.

Gruenberg became a persistent thorn in McWilliams’ side, regularly dissenting against her moves to ease regulations on banks. She ultimately resigned early from her four-year term after Gruenberg and his fellow Democratic board members voted to take public feedback on potential changes to the agency’s bank merger approval process without her say-so.

It was a striking move by the soft-spoken chief bank insurer, who is consistently described by friends and acquaintances as “cautious” above all else.

In a town where people usually jump around to a lot of different jobs, Gruenberg has spent the last three and a half decades at two places: the Senate Banking Committee, where he played a role in drafting legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that governs corporate financial recordkeeping; and the FDIC, where he has served on the board since 2005 — its longest-serving director in history.

“You can tell he’s done this before and frankly been in more chaotic situations than this,” said an official involved in the talks on SVB who was granted anonymity to discuss closed-door conversations. “You never felt like he was in any way flustered or the moment was too big, and he always held his ground in discussions with the Fed, Treasury and the White House.”

Yet Gruenberg’s cautious nature also has played into the criticism, both within the government and in the banking industry, that the FDIC did not have enough urgency in seeking a buyer for SVB.

Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) said he wants to investigate whether decisions made by the deposit insurance agency after SVB was taken over by regulators “thwarted a private sector solution.”

“We could have had a much less costly, non-bailout solution potentially, had they not botched and mismanaged the resolution of the institution,” Barr told POLITICO.

House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry said on Tuesday at an event hosted by news outlet Punchbowl that he wanted to make sure the agency hadn’t avoided selling SVB to particular firms.

Gruenberg noted in his testimony that legal requirements for the FDIC to minimize losses to the deposit insurance fund made it so the agency could not accept the one full, valid bid it received that weekend.

Because the percentage of insured deposits was so low at the bank, the FDIC’s exposure was minimal, and the bid “was more expensive than a liquidation of the institution would’ve been,” he said.

Ultimately the FDIC, along with the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, unanimously voted to invoke an exception allowing the agency to bypass the “least cost” requirements on the justification that failing to back uninsured depositors would’ve caused financial turmoil. They feared that broader panic would spur runs on other healthier institutions.

The Fed and Treasury were resolved earlier in the weekend to move forward with that decision, but for the FDIC, the decision was down to the wire, as Gruenberg worked through the implications with his fellow board members — both Republicans and Democrats.

“His role in part was forcing the group of principals to make sure they showed their work internally to their respective boards” on whether that exception was warranted, the official involved with the talks said.

Once that exception was invoked, the FDIC hired an investment bank and marketed the failed firm more extensively, ultimately receiving 27 bids from 18 bidders, according to Gruenberg’s testimony. Last Sunday, the FDIC announced SVB’s loans and deposits had been sold to another regional lender, First Citizens.

Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) defended the moves by the regulators that initial weekend, arguing that the primary failures were what led to the failure in the first place.

“Monday morning quarterbacking aimed only at the actions of regulators this month is as convenient as it is misplaced — coming from those who have never met a Wall Street wish list they didn’t want to grant,” he said.

But the scrutiny is far from over.

Sheila Bair, a George W. Bush appointee who led the FDIC during the 2008 crisis and worked collaboratively with Gruenberg for years, has criticized the move to back uninsured depositors.

“Is that system really so fragile that it can’t absorb some small haircut on these banks’ uninsured deposits?” she wrote in the Financial Times. “If it is as safe and resilient as we’ve been constantly assured by the government, then the regulators’ move sets dangerous expectations for future bailouts.”

Eleanor Mueller contributed to this report.

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French unions vow further protests on 10th general strike against Macron's pension plans

But the rallies drew smaller crowds even as the government refuses to budge on increased retirement age.

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Wisconsin's Supreme Court race could be the beginning of the end for GOP dominance

Next week's Supreme Court election in Wisconsin could be the beginning of the end of the GOP's near-dominance in Wisconsin.

With the exception of the governorship, Republicans have long had a lock on most levers of power in the state. They have a strong majority of the congressional delegation. They're on the cusp of supermajorities in both legislative chambers. And conservatives currently hold sway on the state Supreme Court.

But a liberal win in the April 4 election could upend all of that. It would give liberals an effective majority on the high court — and with it, the possibility to redraw state and congressional district lines in ways that dramatically curb Republican power.

“Wisconsinites are very familiar with hearing ‘this is the most important election of our lifetime,’” said Sarah Godlewski, a Democrat who was recently appointed to be the Wisconsin secretary of state after running for the Senate last year. But, she emphasized, this race is actually incredibly “consequential” for the longer-term political control of the state.

A liberal takeover of the supreme court could even be a factor in the race for control of the U.S. House in 2024.

A win by Democrat-backed Janet Protasiewicz — which could shift control of the court from a one-seat advantage for conservatives to a 4-3 liberal majority — could have a domino effect in the state. She is facing former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, the conservative candidate backed by the state GOP in the technically non-partisan race.

Most immediately, the court will likely decide the fate of abortion rights in Wisconsin; that and crime have been the focus of much of the debate surrounding the race. But there’s another hugely consequential matter the court could take up: a challenge to the state's congressional district and legislative lines. And an adverse ruling for Republicans would pose a direct threat to the delegation's GOP-heavy makeup.

Currently, Republicans have a near-ironclad hold on the state legislature, a fact that has hamstrung Democratic Gov. Tony Evers throughout his two terms. The GOP is a few seats shy of a supermajority in the state Assembly, and a special election for a red-leaning state Senate seat on Tuesday will determine if the GOP hits the two-thirds mark in the state Senate again.

The state’s congressional delegation, meanwhile, is 6-2 Republican — four safe Republican seats, two deep blue Democratic districts and a pair of red-leaning but potentially competitive districts that the GOP carried in the midterms.

But that GOP dominance is built upon conservative-friendly state and congressional district maps — lines that Democrats are itching to challenge in court.

Wisconsin’s congressional and legislative lines went through lengthy court fights following the 2020 census, after the GOP-controlled legislature and Evers could not reach an agreement on the maps. After a series of rulings from both the state and U.S. Supreme Courts, the state landed on its current legislative and congressional lines.

The U.S. House map ultimately selected by the state Supreme Court was one proposed by Evers — but it was still one that heavily favored Republicans because the court previously ruled the maps must be based on the last decade’s lines.

A win for Protasiewicz could reopen those decisions. Broadly, operatives on both sides believe a redrawn map could endanger the seats of Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden, the two Republicans who represent the red-leaning seats. And the district of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) could be redrawn to become more competitive.

More than $37 million has already been spent on the race as of late last week, according to WisPolitics.com — easily the record for spending on a state Supreme Court race anywhere in the country. But even with the stakes riding on the election, those involved say the contest is still running into the same attention gap that off-year elections face.

“For people that aren’t paying attention, it seems hard to believe that there's a spring election that has cataclysmic importance,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party. “And breaking through that natural skepticism to convey that fact is maybe the central challenge in this organizing push.”

Operatives on both sides believe the race between the two candidates is close, though there have been no nonpartisan public polls.

In the only debate between Protasiewicz and Kelly that took place last week, Protasiewicz criticized the maps, saying they were unfair. “I don’t think anybody thinks those maps are fair. Anybody,” she said during the debate. “The question is am I able to fairly make a decision on a case. Of course I would.”

Some Republicans have attacked these comments, saying she is projecting how she would rule in cases. “I think that it really goes beyond the partisan makeup of the legislature or what the congressional delegation is going to be,” state Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, a Republican, said in an interview. “It really goes to ‘are we going to start to allow Supreme Court justices to just make unilateral decisions?’”

But even setting aside the outcome of Tuesday’s election, there is significant uncertainty over what role the Wisconsin Supreme Court will play in redistricting in the future. There is a case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court that risks cutting state supreme courts out of that role in most federal election questions.

Perhaps even more consequential than any would-be redistricting case is the potential for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to rule on the outcome of a future election — including the 2024 presidential race. In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, the state Supreme Court tossed then-President Donald Trump’s challenge to the outcome in the state. At the time, Justice Brian Hagedorn — a conservative who still serves on the court and has been a swing vote in other big cases — joined the liberal minority on the case.

The most glaring near-term issue the court will grapple with, however, is abortion rights. The state currently has an 1840s law on the books banning abortion in almost all circumstances. A challenge to that law is expected to eventually land in front of the state Supreme Court, but abortion providers in the state have, in the interim, stopped performing the procedure.

Earlier this month, Republican Assembly leaders put forward a proposal to allow for the procedure in cases of rape or incest up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, along with clarifying a “health of the mother” exception. But Republican Senate leaders promised to not take it up, and Evers said he would veto it. Soon after, the governor introduced his own proposal to repeal the 1849 law, but it will not pass the legislature.

Protasiewicz and her allies are hoping the issue will propel her to victory, as it did for many Democrats last fall who outperformed expectations in the midterms. But the race has attracted significant attention from both pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion groups, who say their supporters have been fired up by the contest.

Gracie Skogman, the legislative and PAC director of Wisconsin Right to Life, said there has been an “unprecedented” response from anti-abortion advocates. “I have been truly shocked to see the amount of people who are willing to be involved in this election. That was very unexpected for us,” she added.

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