Kaul Announces He’s Running for (Shadow) Governor

An election already (almost) won

Attorney general Josh Kaul fooled nearly everybody when he announced this past week that he wasn’t running for governor but for another term as attorney general.

Some were surprised because of the timing—an open seat, his strong campaign war chest, and broad name recognition. Some said he was nobly putting his family ahead of politics. Some cast him as a true warrior against all the evils Donald Trump spills into the world, things such as ending wars, forgoing his own ambitions to help bring down the Orange Man’s threat to Western civilization once and for all.

What everybody seems to have missed is that Josh Kaul actually did announce a run for governor. No, it wasn’t some mysterious recording on the DOJ website that you could only hear if you played it backwards. It was right there, in his own carefully parsed words, not immediately obvious until you thought through it for a moment.

For what Kaul really meant when he said he was going to stand for re-election instead of going for governor was, “I am today announcing my candidacy for shadow governor of Wisconsin.”

Or thorn in the side, if you prefer. After all, if a Republican is elected governor next November, Kaul’s likely (though not inevitable) cruise to a third term as attorney general would set him up as the deep state’s chief executive, a relatively powerful elected ally of the bureaucracy whose main mission would be to foil the agenda of the Republican governor and likely Republican legislature.

It might be a crafty move, given that a Republican governor is increasingly likely. The Badger Battleground Poll released this week shows GOP frontrunner Rep. Tom Tiffany with a strong start out of the gate, but the bigger news out of that poll is Donald Trump’s own strong approval rating in the state heading into the election year, on top of 46 percent of respondents aligning themselves with the MAGA movement. Toss in the ragtag collection of lunatic progressives running in the carnival over on the other side, and, well, you can see what is about to take place, barring any unanticipated drama.

This might be a good time to say that politics is always about unanticipated drama, and so anything can happen. As Matt Taibbi put it so well on Substack this week, “One of the reasons I’m proud to be an American is that ours is a country where entertainingly crazy people get to thrive.” Kaul would run a stronger general election race than any of the current misfits, but one of the nutcases might just “thrive” in a Democratic primary and knock him off. So why risk losing it all in a close battleground state when he can almost assuredly serve as a shadow governor with the institutional power of the state’s bureaucracies behind him?

Kaul might be on the ballot next November for attorney general—call it a sop to democracy—but his real electorate is the permanent government itself: the cubicle-caged bureaucrats, professional union comrades, agency lawyers, and civil service managers who turn administrative rule into law with the wave of a hand.

None of this is idle speculation. For six years, Kaul has used the state DOJ to mobilize bureaucratic resistance with the assurance of legal backup—resistance to Washington since Trump took office in January, and resistance to the state legislature when it has challenged state administrative power and demanded oversight. He has done so through lawsuits and selective prosecutions to advance progressive politics in ways that an actual governor can only dream of.

The result is a hybrid department that is less a law enforcement agency than a command post for what progressives call “guardrails” and “democratic resistance.” If you want to understand what a shadow governor looks like, don’t watch the campaign trail. Don’t gape at cabinet members.

Watch the attorney general’s docket.

Look the other way, but don’t turn the other cheek

Many conservatives these days are still rummaging through the attic looking for ways the federal government puts its jackboot on the necks of state agencies, which is textbook vertical integration in the globalist age. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, much of that coercion is indeed still occurring.

However, in the age of Trump, when much of the bureaucratic infrastructure has been disrupted or even razed, state bureaucracies have had to fight for their own survival, and they have done so by biting the hands of the federal agencies that once fed them. By mid-2025, numerous state agencies were pushing back against their federal counterparts, either directly through policy or loudly through the bully pulpit.

The state Department of Health and Human Services (DHS), for example, issued its own cost analysis of congressional health-funding proposals, saying that changes to Medicaid as well as the impact of dismantling key parts of the Affordable Care Act would put more than 250,000 Wisconsinites at risk of losing their health insurance in the next decade, according to the Joint Economic Committee, and projecting $74.2 million in new state training and administrative costs. During the Covid era, DHS considered what came out of the Biden administration to be gospel; now, DHS screams ‘liar, liar, pants on fire.’

Even the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) snapped out of its academic fantasies long enough to refuse to sign a new Title VI “anti-DEI” certification demanded by the U.S. Department of Education. Kaul’s office, by the way, backed that decision, filing a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s threat to withhold federal funding.

Ditto with resistance to new federal vaccine guidelines. Even as the Centers for Disease Control and the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices moved toward a narrower ‘shared decision-making’ approach for Covid vaccines in October, Wisconsin’s DHS persisted in recommending vaccination for everyone aged six months and older.

What’s more, Evers signed an executive order and directed DHS to “use every lever” to preserve vaccine access and empower standing orders. DHS then issued a statewide standing medical order for the 2025–26 season so most people could get vaccinated at pharmacies without a prescription. That was the state constructing its own vaccination access infrastructure to bypass changes in federal guidelines.

In a news release, DHS’s explicitly said it “continues to recommend” Covid vaccinations for 6+ months, and it castigated FDA recommendations that DHS said “conflict[ed] with both previous recommendations issued by the CDC and with updated recommendations from the nation’s leading medical organizations.” The DHS thus bucked previous allegiance to federal agencies for its beloved partners, including such Big-Pharma aligned organizations as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Those are just major flashpoints. Every day, bureaucrats across the administrative landscape find their own ways to resist their former landlords in the federal government.

A father figure

All this attempted bureaucratic resistance has been rather haphazard and ineffective, but it would have been even worse had Josh Kaul not been tending the snake-infested garden. That’s not to criticize the poor bureaucrats, childlike bullies who have understandably been unnerved by the collapse of their parent organizations in 2025, whom they have relied on for so many years to tell them how hard they have to hammer good citizens to get their federal dollars.

Not to mention that many state workers are paid by the federal government.

Without their overseers, state bureaucrats have been trying to resist, but, on their own, they have for the most part flopped around in the weeds like a snake with its head cut off. It has helped them immensely—and probably saved on their therapy bills—that the fatherly figure of Mr. Kaul has been there to lend legal credibility to the bureaucratic enterprise.

Not to mention that, while institutional bureaucratic resistance is powerful, as Trump found out in his first term, it’s even more potent when there is a single figure coordinating the bureaucratic apparatus.

That task would usually fall to the governor, especially when the governor is an aligned progressive, but Tony Evers has been way too busy imitating cardboard to make that happen. So, by default in Wisconsin, it’s the attorney general who does the heavy lifting, and, should Democrats surrender the governorship, it would be the attorney general who would step in as the shadow governor.

And a powerful one, too, with his power to represent agencies when resistance and defiance turn to litigation. In many ways, the activist Kaul is especially fit to serve the role of bureaucratic monarch, or at least its elected sovereign. In early 2025, when the Trump administration began clamping down on environmental and educational grift, Wisconsin became a frontline state in a growing legal insurgency by blue-state attorneys general. Kaul joined at least 21 lawsuits (some say it is many more) against the Trump administration by October of this year, often as a lead or early co-signer.

Among them was State of Washington et al. v. U.S. Department of Transportation, in which Wisconsin joined a multi-state challenge to the Trump administration’s freeze of National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding, a freeze the DOJ says threatened $62 million earmarked for Wisconsin and other states. The state also joined California et al. v. HHS et al., in which Wisconsin joined a suit to bar federal agencies from using or sharing the state’s Medicaid data for immigration enforcement or other non-health purposes.

Kaul has also joined lawsuits contesting the termination of federal education, AmeriCorps, and FEMA mitigation grants—each framed by Kaul as a defense of legality and stability in state programs.

In these cases, Wisconsin was not the victim of federal intrusion so much as a willing combatant, using the DOJ’s imprimatur to push back against Washington itself. Kaul’s press releases spoke less of policy disagreement than of institutional prerogative, as in the EV lawsuit: “The president can’t cancel part of a law by fiat.”

Ah, the attorney general thinks laws can be created by unelected administrative fiat but can’t be canceled in the same way, even by elected officials. The point was less about EV chargers or Medicaid spreadsheets and even less about states’ rights; it was about the rights of the bureaucratic empire and its demand for recognition as an accepted co-equal sovereign with the other three branches of government.

Each of the episodes adds to the same portrait being painted over the last six years: a state bureaucracy asserting institutional autonomy and an attorney general who has turned that autonomy into coordinated resistance.

If one wants to gauge just how Kaul will act with respect to a Republican governor, just consider how he has acted with respect to the GOP-majority legislature. Since his election, the Wisconsin DOJ has become a legal French defense line—ultimately it might be a Maginot line—a game of chess in which the DOJ defends some agencies, sues on behalf of others, and, not least, sues the Legislature itself.

In Kaul v. Wisconsin State Legislature, decided in 2025, he challenged the GOP’s 2018 lame-duck law that required legislative approval of DOJ settlements. The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the key provisions, restoring the attorney general’s unilateral control over such litigation. In Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce v. DNR, the DOJ defended the DNR’s authority under the state Spills Law to compel PFAS cleanup, a position the court upheld, reaffirming broad enforcement power.

In Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2022, the DOJ represented WEC against conservative plaintiffs who sought to ban absentee-ballot drop boxes. The conservatives prevailed, temporarily, but Kaul’s presence underscored his willingness to defend administrative discretion even when the political odds were long. Not least, during the pandemic, Kaul’s DOJ defended then DHS secretary Andrea Palm’s unconstitutional emergency-health powers that allowed Palm to shut down non-essential businesses and to order people not to travel and to stay at home.

Whether confronting the Legislature, business lobbies, or conservative courts, Kaul has defined his role not as neutral counsel dedicated to ruling on what the constitution or statutes mandate, but as chief litigator for the administrative state; nay, he had defined himself as its governor-king, and, unlike Tiffany or another Republican, he’s already sworn in.

Not just like any other AG

Ah, but many ask, won’t a Republican governor be able to rein in a rogue attorney general who decides not to go along with the will of the people but defer to the prerogatives of the unelected bureaucracy? Won’t Kaul, as attorney general, be forced to represent the state’s interests, even if those interests are then serving the conservative cause, as sanctioned by the voters of the state? Isn’t the attorney general roped in by statute and constitution?

Too many people don’t realize that the answer is, not really.

First off, Wisconsin Constitution’s Article VI makes the attorney general an independently elected constitutional officer, not an appointee of the governor. To be sure, state law directs the AG to “appear for the state and prosecute or defend all actions and proceedings, civil or criminal, in the court of appeals and the supreme court, in which the state is interested or a party …” The question is, who decides when the state is interested?

That would be the attorney general.

But it’s the statutes that really empower him. They are littered with discretion for the AG’s office, and that statutory power is bolstered by separation of powers jurisdiction. The truth is, Wisconsin’s AG operates with more power than most state attorneys general, despite the fact that the office’s powers are grounded in statute and not common law. The office can initiate or join litigation without the governor’s approval, decline to defend laws it deems unconstitutional, and exercise exclusive authority over civil settlements absent explicit statutory limits. It may even file amicus briefs advancing a view of the state’s interest contrary to that of another branch. And, as seen in the year’s case in which Kaul challenged the legislature, statutory containment can be overcome by the separation of powers doctrine.

The result is a constitutional bookending of power. While Wisconsin’s governor is a powerful post, so is the other statewide elected executive of the executive branch. Wisconsin’s AG enjoys exceptionally broad discretion in practice, especially within enforcement and settlement decisions—thanks to judicial and statutory ratifications of executive autonomy. Among the 50 states, only a handful, most notably California and New York, give their attorneys general comparable freedom to chart their own legal course. Texas and Florida, for example, have a statutory duty to defend all state laws. Not Kaul. Wisconsin’s attorney general now ranks among the most autonomous in the nation.

That’s the perfect set-up for a shadow governor. It allows someone like Kaul to decide whether to protect a Republican governor’s policy based on the rule of law or to side with the bureaucracy resisting it, based on its perverted law of rules.

And while it isn’t rampant, Wisconsin has a history of attorneys general exercising their vast discretion to buck sitting governors and agencies, across parties and decades. For example, attorney general J.B. Van Hollen refused in 2009 to defend the state’s domestic-partnership registry, arguing that it violated the 2006 marriage amendment. Governor Jim Doyle hired outside counsel, and the registry was later upheld. In 1979, Democrat Bronson La Follette declined to defend the DNR’s power-plant siting approval, judging its environmental review “legally inadequate.”

Each instance demonstrates that Wisconsin’s AG is not bound to defend state agencies or laws automatically. The attorney general determines where the state’s interests lie, both statutorily and constitutionally; the AG also decides where legality ends and politics begins.

The foregoing examples notwithstanding, previous attorneys general did not wield their discretion so actively—and activistly—as Kaul, who has used his discretion with egregious political vigor to champion the bureaucracies when the Legislature or courts threaten their autonomy.

When an issue arises, there’s no doubting where Kaul’s DOJ will head. That has not always been the case with the state’s attorneys general, though perhaps it is just a sign of the polarized times rather than of a politician with deep moral flaws. For instance, as attorney general, JB Van Hollen asserted that state attorneys general must defend state constitutional amendments and further argued that state attorneys general could concede the unconstitutionality of state statutes only in “rare cases.”

But there are constitutional boundaries that inhibit the state’s ability to constrain a politically rogue attorney general. For example, the statutes, citing State v. City of Oak Creek, point out in a footnote, that “the attorney general does not have authority to challenge the constitutionality of statutes.”

And yet Kaul did challenge the constitutionality of a statute and won, and, in Kaul v. Wisconsin State Legislature this year, the court explicitly and unanimously ruled that constitutional separation of powers supersedes statutory limitations placed on the executive branch when it concerns the core powers of the executive:

So even if a statute says the AG “may not challenge” a law, the constitution outranks the statute, and the courts have recognized the AG’s standing to defend the executive branch’s constitutional role:

The problem is, while the ruling protects the ability of the attorney general to operate without improper meddling by the legislature, there’s no clearcut mechanism to allow the elected governor and legislature to function without undue meddling from the attorney general, at least so long as current statutory schemes remain in place. Expect Kaul, as long as he is in office, to continue rolling along on the same instincts, framing the “public interest” not as the will of elected legislators but as the lawful discretion of expert agencies acting under existing statute.

The danger ahead

The independence of Wisconsin’s attorneys general has always been a double-edged sword, and that tradition is what makes Kaul’s position so powerful in an era of divided government. The AG’s discretion to decline defense can just as easily become the discretion to decline enforcement, or, on the other hand, to enforce selectively. If and when that power becomes partisan and not grounded in law, it becomes dangerous.

Just recently, I reported on how Kaul’s DOJ hired a politically vested progressive in-house attorney to work as an attack dog against conservatives, with the special-interest attorney’s nonprofit paying the attorney rather than the DOJ. Wisconsin is one of only 10 states using this arrangement, which is unconstitutional because it violates due process and equal protection guarantees, while improperly delegating prosecutorial power to an outside, privately funded interest.

But who is going to tell Kaul he can’t do it? The courts might—emphasize the word ‘might’—but nobody in the executive branch can, not that Evers would want to. The Legislature certainly can’t, not without newly enacted law. If the courts don’t step in, a Gov. Tiffany might be stuck with it.

That’s not all. Should a future Republican governor attempt to rescind administrative rules, redirect settlement funds, or impose new guidance on election administration, Kaul could—lawfully—refuse to execute or defend those actions if they landed in court.

We also know by Kaul’s compulsive signing onto lawsuits against the Trump administration that he is ready to go against a Republican administration—just call him the human autopen when it comes to signing onto lawsuits. He wouldn’t even have to win every case. Delay is victory in bureaucracy because real humans have life spans, not to mention finite bank accounts, while bureaucracy just lives on forever, all the while spending other people’s money.

All in all, the attorney general’s discretion is the shadow governor’s veto, an immensely powerful weapon when used, and Kaul uses it often.

The bottom line is, practically speaking, the state’s top lawyer is functionally unshackled by existing statutory and constitutional constraints. That means a Republican governor’s policy victories could face not only the predictable court challenges from liberal advocacy groups but also institutional non-cooperation from within the state itself—led, orchestrated, and legitimized by the attorney general’s office.

It’s all a fair warning that conservatives should not ignore the attorney general’s race—best contest it if you don’t want this nightmare—and that any new Republican governor must have a battle plan for airtight legislation to implement with Trump-like swiftness starting on Inauguration Day.

Deconstructing the statutory political power of the attorney general maybe ought to be near the top of the list. The fact that the AG’s powers are grounded in statute and not common law give a GOP government a statutory opening. They should walk through it, not close the door.