Three Women and a Legislature: The Lawmakers Who Made the Session Matter

A rarified air

There is a familiar rhythm to legislative sessions in Wisconsin. The bold promises of opening day are followed by institutional and special-interest obstruction, then procedural drift (if not outright drifting into sleep), and finally an adjournment that leaves everybody frustrated.

And so it was again this year.

Now that the legislature has wrapped up its work—Democrats dispersing to try and convince the masses that fiscal responsibility and scientific fact are fascist; Republicans busily trying to figure out how to lose the midterms—it is time for an honest accounting. And this year, an honest accounting might make this a very short essay because, stripped of pomp and pomposity, this session was, for conservatives, underwhelming.

Except, that is, for three lawmakers who made the session matter. And they are why I’m not going to wrap this piece up right here and now.

In a session otherwise defined by circular firing squads, failed attempts at selling out (remember ROFR and the original Stewardship bill), and even rhetorical absurdism (one Republican proclaimed that capitalism doesn’t work when it comes to utilities), these three Republican legislators did something rare in Wisconsin politics.

They led. They fought hard and consistently for conservative principles and did so on policies that really matter. The three legislators I’m talking about made me hopeful about the future of conservatism: Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart), Rep. Lindee Brill (R-Sheboygan Falls), and Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie).

Now that’s not to say there weren’t some pretty good achievements by other conservatives, male and female. In all seriousness, there were. Some worked side by side as co-authors on the very bills I laud these three for. It’s just that, in the larger scheme of the movement and where we are headed, Goeben, Brill, and Nedweski seem more attuned to the important fights we need to prioritize, more visionary in their grasp of the centrality of free markets, individual liberty, and parental rights, and more consistent in their fierce defense of families and children.

More than most, these three lawmakers seemed to grasp the nature of the power struggle we are in—the need to decentralize power away from government and corporate institutions and toward individuals and families. So, sorry guys. In this session, the women had a field day and led the way. Not all their bills passed, but they did something more important—they defined tomorrow’s battlefield by putting core issues on the table and forcing debates others avoided.

In a year that might otherwise be forgotten, they made it matter. Let’s take a look.

Joy Goeben: Seeing the forest and the trees

If there was a single bill this session that both exposed the absurdity of the modern progressive movement and highlighted the need for conservative clarity, it was Joy Goeben’s targeting of local rights-of-nature ordinances.

On its face, the bill sounded almost like satire—a proposal to prevent local governments from passing ordinances giving legal rights to a natural resource to exist, to be protected against pollution, or to maintain a healthy ecosystem. But, as Goeben understands, that absurdity is no longer hypothetical. It is an actual progressive action item, one of their boxes to be checked, and, if they could pull it off, the results would be catastrophic for private property and commerce.

“There is a growing trend in the far-left ecological communities to imbue legal personhood on non-human entities, such as rivers, lakes, and other natural resources or geological formations,” Goeben said in circulating her bill, along with co-author, Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater). “This legislation will preserve the credibility of our court system and ensure that humans are the entities availing themselves of their judicial rights, and not nebulous entities without constitutional rights or standing.”

Goeben said her bill was about fundamentally ensuring that our foundational rights as human beings are protected.

“Our Founding Fathers recognized this from our earliest days,” she said. “The U.S. Declaration of Independence explicitly says ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.’ All men and women, all humans have intrinsic rights, not plants, trees, and water.”

As Goeben pointed out in a memo to lawmakers, more than 30 local governments in at least 10 states have adopted or attempted to adopt “rights of nature” measures. Milwaukee County passed a non-binding resolution in 2023 supporting the concept, while lawmakers in New York have introduced legislation recognizing ecosystems’ “unalienable” rights. In Minnesota legislators have proposed measures recognizing wild rice’s inherent right to exist and thrive.

The implications of such legal rights are staggering. Grant legal standing to a river, and suddenly development becomes litigation. Grant rights to ecosystems, and property rights become conditional. Grant personhood to nature, and the very foundation of human-centered law begins to erode. You and your development project might get sued by a wetland, for real.

Goeben and Nass—with Nedweski and Brill as co-sponsors—got their bill through the legislature, but last week Evers vetoed it, essentially saying no problem if local communities, in the name of local control, want to vitiate our constitutional rights. In response, Goeben issued a passionate, articulate response that can be held up as an exquisite summation of the conservative movement’s fundamental principles, namely, at the heart of conservatism is the belief that rights are not manufactured by government but inherent to the individual and grounded in a higher authority:

Goeben is perhaps one of the few lawmakers who understands that when government claims the authority to invent new rights, it implicitly claims the authority to terminate existing ones, and that is where liberty begins to die.

Goeben’s work did not stop at the progressive rock quarry. She also authored social media and app store parental-consent bills that represented the most substantive and data-driven efforts this session to confront a growing crisis: the industrial-scale manipulation of children by technology platforms and, more accurately, large corporate predators.

Rather than ban minors from app stores and social media—nanny government robbing parents of their authority or letting children run completely wild in the internet jungle—the bill would have required social media companies and app stores to obtain parental consent before allowing minors to maintain accounts, using already available technology for age verification.

Consider the numbers cited in testimony: 76 percent of teens use YouTube daily; 61 percent use TikTok daily; 1 in 5 report using platforms “almost constantly.” This isn’t nanny state puffery; it is parent state common sense.

The point was to restore parental authority, Goeben said, pointing out what is obvious common sense—you need your parents’ permission as a minor to do all sorts of everyday things.

“This bill doesn’t tell parents how to raise their kids,” she testified in February. “It simply says that if a company wants access to a minor, access to their time, their attention, and their personal data, parents deserve to know, and parents deserve control.”

In a legislature often accused of overreach, this was a rare example of trying to rebalance power away from corporations and government and back to families.

Goeben also waded into one of Wisconsin’s most pressing economic issues: housing supply. Her accessory dwelling unit (ADU) legislation, which would have permitted ADUs in residential or mixed-use neighborhoods, was more practical than ideological. Observing that the number of home permits issued in Wisconsin had dropped from an annual average of about 30,000 between 1994 and 2005 to 12,837 in 2024, Goeben thought it might be a good time to let people use their own property.

“At its heart, this bill is about protecting and affirming the property rights of Wisconsin homeowners,” Goeben testified about the bill last September.

“Across our state, individuals and families invest their savings, their hard work, and their futures into their homes. They deserve the reasonable freedom to make practical use of their property in ways that benefit their families, their neighbors, and their communities. Allowing a homeowner to create a modest secondary living space on their own parcel is a commonsense recognition of that right.”

That’s not just conservative philosophy. That’s economic necessity.

In the previous session, Goeben also authored legislation ultimately vetoed by Evers to prevent organ transplant recipients or donors from being discriminated against based upon their vaccination status and allowing individuals to bring an action in circuit court if they were.

It is yeoman’s work from a rising conservative who gets it.

Rep. Lindee Brill: Restoring the Family

Joy Goeben wasn’t the only lawmaker working to restore clarity to who governs the most intimate decisions in American life. So was Brill, and her major fights involved an even more explicit challenge to establishment institutions.

In Brill’s view, those decisions belong to the family, not to the school or the state. And in Wisconsin this year, that fight moved from abstraction to statute. Brill, along with state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, introduced what they described as a family-first transparency bill, aimed at something deceptively simple: ensuring parents know about the rights they already have.

Under current Wisconsin law, parents may opt their children out of school vaccination requirements for health, religious, or personal convictions. But, as Brill observed, rights that are unknown are rights that go unused, and often enough, rights that are quietly bypassed.

“Currently, parents have a right to opt out of vaccination requirements when enrolling their children in school,” Brill said. “However, many parents are unaware of this right or are unclear about how to obtain that waiver and feel pressured to make medical decisions for their children that they otherwise would not have.”

Brill said her bill would ensure that schools inform parents of the rights already afforded to them under Wisconsin law and include information about the waiver from the vaccine requirement and a procedure for presenting it in any required pre-enrollment health-related forms.

“This bill does not change Wisconsin’s immunization laws or waiver criteria—it simply ensures that parents are informed of their rights at the time they are making enrollment decisions,” she said. “By increasing transparency and accessibility, we reduce confusion, support parental rights, and create a more consistent process across the state.”

Interestingly, Brill’s bill came under fire in a press conference from Dr. Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer of DHS’s Bureau of Communicable Diseases, who linked ‘low vaccination rates’ at least in part with Wisconsin parents’ right to obtain a waiver for their children from the school vaccine requirements for reasons of personal conviction, health concern, or religious belief.

Brill didn’t back down. She said Westergaard’s viewpoint was part of the problem.

“However, there was little to no discussion of why a parent might choose to seek this waiver,” she said of Westergaard’s press conference. 

“In fact, when a reporter specifically asked what the state was doing to urge manufacturers to separate the measles vaccine from the rubella vaccine (which is manufactured using cells from aborted children and thus the principal element of concern among many parents who seek a waiver for religious reasons), Dr. Westergaard dismissed the question, saying, ‘To my knowledge the state had not engaged with any manufacturers on that issue.’”

But that was the core issue, Brill said.

“While the Department of Health Services is deeply concerned over low vaccination rates, it has shown little interest in understanding or resolving the sincere religious or personal objections many parents have,” she said. “The religious concerns of many communities regarding the use of aborted fetal cells in vaccine production are real. Public officials should take them seriously, not dismiss them out of hand while trying harder to persuade families to make health decisions which may violate their beliefs.”

All of which is why she introduced the bill, Brill said.

“The rights of parents are not negotiable and ought to be reinforced, not eroded,” she said. “If DHS is concerned about low vaccination rates, they should work diligently to remedy the root cause of parents’ concern regarding the vaccine, not treat their right to act in accord with that concern as an inconvenient obstacle.”

Brill had another brush with the medical establishment over vaccine exemptions, after the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly urged the end of all vaccine exemptions everywhere, for all reasons other than medical ones.

On X, Brill advised her followers to “follow the money,” linking to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ website and a listing of its corporate donors, including Moderna, Pfizer, and Merck, some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

“It’s not about our health,” Brill posted.

Then, too, when the Evers administration was posturing about the gravity of a spring season bird flu outbreak, Brill voiced concerns not only about the flu but what the administration might try to do about it, as in taking away our civil liberties, as the governor attempted during Covid.

Specifically, Brill worried that Evers could turn the bird flu outbreak into another public health emergency.

“It seems that more and more headlines are emerging designed to stoke anxiety among the public about the potential for a bird flu pandemic,” she said. “In light of this, I am calling on Governor Evers to be open with the people of our state regarding how he would handle a future public health emergency.”

Brill said many people in Wisconsin still remember the governor’s public health emergency orders from the Covid outbreak.

“Whether it was keeping our children out of school, forcing the public to wear face coverings, placing onerous restrictions on churches that restricted our ability to worship, or one of his several other authoritarian dictates, it is clear to most that this Governor did not value the freedom of the individual when issuing his mandates during Covid,” she said.

Most important on this issue, Brill was prescient enough to grasp that we had not remedied the government’s ability to take away our personal freedoms so easily. Brill subsequently signed onto a proposed constitutional amendment by Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee) that would stop Evers, or any other governor, from going down the same path again, by prohibiting state and local governments from closing places of worship during public emergencies.

“While protecting civil liberties in the midst of an emergency may not be a priority of this Governor, I believe preserving Wisconsinites’ rights must be our paramount concern,” she said. “This is a common-sense approach to safeguard the religious liberties Governor Evers so callously abrogated during Covid.”

That was yet another example of having her priorities straight, and it paid off because voters will decide the matter in November. Expect freedom to take the win.

Brill didn’t neglect the biggest civil-rights issue of the day, either, the movement by the progressive left to strip women of their hard-won rights under the guise of transgender equality.

Along with Nass, she authored a bill to prevent the alteration of a birth certificate to reflect a sex other than a person’s biological sex.

She called it “basic, common-sense legislation to ensure that a birth certificate reflects reality, not ideology or feelings.” It was, but, lacking common sense, the legislature did not pass the legislation.

Amanda Nedweski: Drawing Clear Lines

Amanda Nedweski, too, worked the legislative trenches on behalf of children and families, and for anchoring law in reality rather than in fantasy.

Most prominently, and successfully, working with Sen. Jesse James, Nedweski introduced legislation to create a criminal offense for grooming a child for sexual activity—a gap in Wisconsin law that has allowed predatory behavior to evade meaningful prosecution.

The enacted bill establishes a Class G felony as the base penalty, enhanced penalties for offenders in positions of trust, and mandatory sex offender registration. Nedweski and James introduced the bill after a year-long investigation by The Cap Times revealed widespread allegations of sexual misconduct and grooming in Wisconsin schools—and, critically, a lack of transparency in how those cases were handled.

Nedweski pointed directly to one such case: a Kenosha teacher accused of grooming a 14-year-old student over two years, who ultimately received just one year in jail for misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

That, Nedweski said, was a system failure.

“As a mom, I know the extent of trust that parents place in the people who care for their children,” she said. “When that trust is betrayed, the consequences should be severe and certain. Right now, many predators are able to evade accountability because Wisconsin does not have criminal penalties for grooming a child. Our bill changes that.”

Nedweski has also stepped into one of the most contentious debates in modern medicine: gender-related procedures on minors. She was a lead author of legislation to hold doctors accountable for irreversible gender procedures on minors, creating a civil cause of action for people injured by such procedures as minors.

Under the proposed legislation, people having gender transition surgeries or procedures while under the age of 18 would be allowed to file a civil lawsuit against the health care provider if they suffered injury as a result. There would also be an extended statute of limitations, permitting claims to be brought until age 33.

Nedweski said the extended statute of limitations acknowledged that the consequences of such procedures may not fully emerge until adulthood. She pointed a finger at those profiting from transgender surgery on minors and said they should be held accountable.

“Over just the past few years, the market for gender transition treatments has exploded,” Nedweski testified about the bill in January.

Neither has her work been confined to social policy. On education, Nedweski has taken a hard look at demographic reality—and the fiscal consequences of ignoring it. Nearly 70 percent of Wisconsin school districts have experienced enrollment decline over the past decade, Nedweski says, and the decline, she said, was not a temporary fluctuation. Her subsequent leadership and support for school consolidation incentive measures reflected a willingness to confront that reality head-on.

“Wisconsin already has some of the highest property tax rates in the country—and that burden will only grow because of Governor Evers’s 400-year property tax increase,” she said. “These bills give districts a different path forward by providing incentives for voluntary consolidation and removing the barriers that often prevent potential partnerships from taking shape.”

Nedweski said the issue would not go away.

“There is no referendum, no funding increase, and no talking point that can reverse decades of falling birth rates,” she said. “Democrats want you to believe that spending more money to educate fewer kids in half-empty buildings will solve the problem.”

The bills would allow districts to share staff, reduce duplicative services, increase teacher pay, and expand academic offerings such as AP courses, world languages, career and technical education, special education services, and other classroom resources, Nedweski said.

“Buildings don’t educate kids, teachers do,” she said. “When districts are able to collaborate, reduce overhead, and put more resources into our classrooms, everybody wins.”

Needless to say, these bills did not make it out of the legislative session alive.

Nedweski has also pushed back against what she sees as a growing culture of censorship on college campuses, introducing legislation with Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R-Appleton), Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Greenville) and Rep. Nate Gustafson (R-Fox Crossing) to establish statewide standards protecting free expression and academic freedom on Wisconsin’s public college campuses. In supporting legislation to protect free speech at UW institutions, she pointed to free speech as a core value.

“Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder—and the disturbing celebrations of it coming from some within academia—should serve as a sobering reminder to us all,” she said. “When society begins to accept the false premise that dissenting speech is equivalent to violence, we create a culture where violence replaces discourse.”

Apparently, Evers did not agree. He vetoed the bill.

Last but not least, Nedweski also was front and center in an effort to stop the revolving door between the state’s Public Service Commission and the utility industry. Her legislation would establish a three-year prohibition preventing members of the PSC from accepting employment with public utility or transmission companies after leaving office.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the work these conservative leaders do in the legislature. And again, I do not downplay the work of other conservative lawmakers who stood beside these three lawmakers and even co-authored many of these proposals. It’s just that, on issue after issue, Goeben, Brill, and Nedweski stood up for some of the more controversial but needed measures—repeatedly siding with their constituents and the average residents of Wisconsin, not with the special interests who hold so much sway these days in both parties.

They showed an uncommon willingness and ability to confront institutional power in both parties in the fight for individual liberty and decentralized community power. And that’s what the fight is all about.

May they prosper as much in the next legislative session, and may more lawmakers follow in their footsteps.