Roys on ‘UpFront’ wants Evers to make decision on run ‘sooner rather than later’

Dem state Sen. Kelda Roys says she wants Gov. Tony Evers to make his reelection decision “hopefully sooner rather than later.”

“He’s going to make that decision,” Roys said in an interview Friday that aired on WISN 12’s “UpFront,” which is produced in partnership with WisPolitics. “I’d like to see him make a decision, hopefully sooner rather than later, because I do think we’ve got a lot of elections that we need to be winning and focusing on.

“People should just hear my words,” Roys added. “I think the Democratic Party is in great shape. If the governor makes a decision, I hope that’s going to be soon.”

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Roys, a member of the powerful budget-writing committee, said her focus in 2026 is “building the majority in the state Senate” when asked if she would seek a bid for governor if Evers didn’t. She blasted Republicans who control the committee for their most recent tax cut and K-12 spending plan as part of the next state budget.

GOP State Sen. Romaine Quinn called the spending in special education the highest percentage since 1996.

“I think that’s pathetic,” Roys said. “I read letters that we had gotten from his own constituents saying we cannot continue this cycle. We need 60% reimbursement and something sufficient so that our school districts can operate. They talked about how it was hurting kids, how they were losing teachers and just how hard it is for their communities to have to go through these cycles of referendum. And it’s just disappointing that Sen. Quinn, Sen. Marklein and other Republicans on the committee apparently don’t care about the pain that they’re causing their constituents.” 

Also on the program, Milwaukee County Chief Judge Carl Ashley says he’s talking with federal immigration officials as he prepares a new courthouse policy that is “coming to fruition” after the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan.

“I will say that I’m in conversation with immigration, customs and enforcement officials recently, last week,” Ashley told “UpFront.” “And why? Because there is an effort to try to realize how they can do their work and how we can do ours, and so this is an ongoing discussion. And I hope to based on some recent events, and also some clarity from other aspects of polices that we were able to come up with, something that’s going to be supportive of what we have to do as judicial officers in Milwaukee County and what ICE has to do as well.

“So there’s some discussions, recent discussions on how we collaborate and come up with an understanding,” Ashley added. “Because what we want to do is, we want to be able to handle our proceedings. We don’t want the proceedings to be interrupted, to be interfered with. We also understand that in the public hallways, that’s a different issue.”

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Dugan of helping an undocumented immigrant evade ICE agents, who were waiting in the hallway, after appearing in her courtroom on local domestic battery charges.

“I do need guidance,” Ashley said. “We’ve got 47 judges, including me, so I do want a policy so that there’s some clarity on what the parameters are. As you might expect, not all of my colleagues have the same opinion about certain things. But we have a job to do, and we also want to make sure that at the end of the day we’re doing the best thing we can to support our activities and making sure that we do our jobs.”

Ashley also pushed the need for a new public safety building because of safety concerns. County leaders are lobbying state lawmakers to include some state money in the budget.

“We can’t avoid the realities of what’s going on in our country,” Ashley said. “The numbers are going up, but I think it’s an important opportunity for us to see why we need a new criminal safety building for Milwaukee County because it’s going to provide what the Supreme Court says, which is there should be sectoring, and that means there’s an area that the public comes through, there’s an area for designated people–judges, staff, jurors–and then there’s a section for those in custody and law enforcement.”

In another segment, Alex Thompson, co-author of the new book “Original Sin” and national political correspondent for Axios, says it’s still unclear where investigations like the one launched by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson will go looking into former President Biden’s decline.

“Congress is a place sometimes for show trials, but sometimes investigations do actually reveal new information,” Thompson said. “And honestly, I think it’s going to depend on a combination of: does this Trump White House, what does it do with the Biden White House’s executive privilege claims, which I’m sure there will be? I think it will also depend on the documents that are shared and how much, how serious are people like Sen. Ron Johnson, and on the other side, congressman James Comer, about doing a real serious investigation as opposed to sort of an investigation by press release just to keep this in the news.”

The book details what it calls Biden’s “decline, its cover-up and his disastrous choice to run again.”

“On the right, there’s a well, we all knew this already,” Thompson said. “And on the left, there’s why are we talking about this now, given that Donald Trump is president? What actually has been really nice is that I think a lot of people in the center, and a lot of good faith people that aren’t just hyper partisans, have been curious in good faith and want to know exactly what happened.”

Thompson said he and co-author Jake Tapper started writing the book after the November election.

“We started on this book on Nov. 6,” he said. “We had no book deal, no interviews done really and no words written, and then we basically sprinted to the end because of a lot of people didn’t want to be completely candid or talk at all before the election because there was just this high fear that even though there was internal concerns about Biden’s abilities, especially to serve another four years until January of 2029, that saying anything wasn’t going to change his mind. It was only going to help Trump.”

See more from the show.