Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:01 and sunset is 7:05 for 12 hours 4 minutes of daytime. The moon will be new this evening.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1925, the 1925 Tri-State tornado hits Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, killing 695 people.
Fifteen years is a long time. From 2011 to today, the WISGOP has controlled both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature. The prospect of losing control of the Wisconsin Senate now looms:
The potential for Republicans to lose the Senate majority in the next election cycle cast a shadow over the Wisconsin State Senate’s last regular day of work this legislative session. Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) faced criticism from his members for bringing bills to a vote without a majority of support from his caucus and one longtime Republican announced his retirement.
Wisconsin Republicans currently hold an 18-seat majority in the 33-seat state Senate. The 17 odd-numbered seats will be up for election this year for the first time under the new maps adopted in 2024, which puts the majority in play this November. Democrats have not been in the Senate or Assembly majority since the 2009-10 session.
LeMahieu drew fire from members of his own party for allowing votes on bills supported by Democrats to legalize sports betting in Wisconsin and to provide funding to the University of Wisconsin to help pay student athletes for their name, image and likeness. Some Republicans who opposed the bills said it would lead to LeMahieu losing his leadership position and to Republicans losing their Senate majority in November.
Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), who is one of the most conservative lawmakers in the state Senate and is retiring at the end of his term, said voters will hold Republican lawmakers “to account for selling out their interests” in November.
“The passage of these two unpopular bills will help pave the way to minority status for Republicans come November,” Nass, who has served in the Legislature since 1991, said in a statement.
See Baylor Spears, With majority at stake this fall, WI Senate GOP’s divisions and departures mark last session day, Wisconsin Examiner, March 18, 2026.
Republicans were likely already on the way to minority status in the Wisconsin Senate. In any event, Nass’s reasoning makes no sense. If the bills are unpopular and most Republicans oppose those same bills, then most Republicans should benefit by their opposition.
Instead, LeMahieu calculates that the bills are sufficiently popular, and that the Republican caucus’s majority is out of step, so he’s allowed bills forward without a majority of WISGOP senators in favor. (That’s a quality that any party should want in a legislative leader: the ability to assess and compromise for an overall benefit.)
Nass has held office for decades, having lost the sense (if ever he had it) that a majority of the WISGOP caucus does not always mean a majority of the Legislature, let alone a majority of Wisconsinites.
That lack of sense — senselessness, one might say — is one of the many reasons Nass’s pending retirement has been overdue.
Video captures a suspected meteor falling over Ohio and Pennsylvania: