The Wisconsin Senate held its last session of 2024 on Tuesday with no plans to return this calendar year.
The upper chamber adjourned and will not meet again until January 2025, despite pocketing a full-time salary for only a few months of work. Salaries for all Wisconsin state legislators are $57,408.
“By adjourning early for the 2023-24 legislative session — nearly a full month before their own calendar prescribed — Senate Republicans sent a message to our Wisconsin neighbors that they believe our job is done,” Minority Caucus Chairman Chris Larson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
The Senate does have meetings set through May, but Republican leaders do not plan on meeting moving forward according to an Associated Press reporter.
“The Senate has four potential floor days in April and a veto-review period in May,” a spokesperson for Senate Majority leader Devin LeMahieu told the Washington Examiner. “Senators and Representatives up for election in November become candidates for their seats on April 15, the first-day nomination papers can be taken out. The legislature generally does not meet often after that deadline.”
Democrats argue there is more work to be done this year and would prefer to keep working into next month.
“Monday processing, missing and murdered women task force, DACA, expungement, right of first refusal, and there are others,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein said. “Once again, we shouldn’t be done today. We should be coming back into session until April 11.”
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In 2020, WisPolitics found the Wisconsin legislature to be the “least active full-time state legislative body in the country.” In nine other states with full-time legislators, lawmakers met 18 times more frequently than those in Wisconsin.
“The good news is that fairer maps are on the way, and with them we can expect a legislature more willing to come together to do the people’s work,” Larson said. “After 14 years of gerrymandered Republican majorities, this change is long overdue.”
