A state Supreme Court decision wresting rulemaking authority from elected state representatives has opened the door to a barrage of new regulations and fees in Wisconsin.

In a bitterly split ruling in Evers v. Marklein on July 8, the court handed regulatory oversight to the governor and the many departments his administration oversees. The majority neutered the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules, a committee created in bipartisan spirit 59 years ago to act as a clearinghouse for the growing regulatory state.

The decision is a bellwether in the state court’s hard progressive shift after the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz in 2023 ended 15 years of conservative sway.

In the latest case, conservative justices in their dissents questioned whether the ruling was constitutional and blasted the majority for its transparent politicking.

“Nowhere in the constitution did the people of Wisconsin consent to be governed by rules imposed by the administrative state rather than laws passed by their elected representatives,” Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote in her dissent.

With automated, driverless robotaxis carrying paying passengers in at least half a dozen cities, but none of them in Wisconsin because our state law will not permit it, you may wonder why we don’t just change our law.

Why not update the state law that requires a human in the driver’s seat?

“It’s something a number of states have not done,” said transport expert Baruch Feigenbaum, “and the reason is largely labor.”

If you make your living by driving people around, said Feigenbaum, who heads transportation policy at the California-based Reason Foundation, “you are concerned that automated vehicles are going to put you out of a job.”

In other words, it’s a disruptive technology that upends established practices. Think cargo containers making cross-ocean shipping vastly cheaper, or the internet killing off newspapers’ lucrative help-wanted ads.

Change can be hard — and very, very good.

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Wisconsin’s district-run public schools had $18,592 of revenue per pupil, an all-time high and more than twice what it was in the school year ending in 2000, according to the most recent figures from the Department of Public Instruction.

The figure’s peak status holds even after adjusting for inflation.

In 2023-2024, school districts in Wisconsin took in $15.3 billion in revenue and educated 827,397 students as counted by the DPI for school finance purposes. Dividing one by the other gives a per-pupil revenue figure.

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