Scott Fitzgerald Corruption & Ethics Jobs Wisconsin

Twelve Days Ago, a Court Revived Scott Fitzgerald's Act 10. The Exemption at the Heart of the Case Covered the Agency His Father Had Just Been Handed.

On Feb. 8, 2011, Walker's team gave the State Patrol to the father of Wisconsin's two most powerful Republicans. Three days later came the bill that stripped bargaining rights from most public workers — and exempted the State Patrol. That exemption is why the law is still in court in 2026.

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On July 29, 2026, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals reversed a lower-court ruling and upheld Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most of Wisconsin's public employees. The unions are expected to appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Fifteen years on, that law is still the most consequential thing Scott Fitzgerald has ever done. He was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when it passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers ran both houses of the legislature that sent it to Scott Walker's desk.

And the legal defect that has kept Act 10 in court for a decade and a half — the reason a Dane County judge threw out chunks of it in 2024 and the reason it's headed to a state Supreme Court that will have a 5-2 liberal majority in September — is about who the law let off.

One of the agencies it let off had been handed to Scott Fitzgerald's father three days before the bill was introduced.

The timeline

February 8, 2011. The Walker administration named Stephen Fitzgerald superintendent of the Wisconsin State Patrol. Stephen Fitzgerald is the father of Scott Fitzgerald, then Senate Majority Leader, and Jeff Fitzgerald, then Assembly Speaker. He had been Dodge County sheriff for 14 years and a U.S. marshal.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board did not take long to react. Their editorial ran under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism," and opened: "The father of Wisconsin's two most powerful state lawmakers was just picked to lead the Wisconsin State Patrol, and that doesn't pass the smell test."

Scott Fitzgerald said he had not been consulted about his father's application and had not asked to be.

February 11, 2011. Three days later, Walker introduced the budget repair bill that became Act 10.

March 2011. It passed, over weeks of protests that filled the Capitol. Scott Fitzgerald ran it through the Senate.

What the law did — and who it skipped

Act 10 ended most collective bargaining for state, county, municipal and school employees. Teachers, nurses, prison staff, snowplow drivers, clerks: all stripped.

But it carved out a category called "public safety employees." According to a Wisconsin Legislative Council issue brief, that category covers police officers, firefighters, deputy sheriffs, county traffic police, combined village protective services officers — and state patrol members and state motor vehicle inspectors.

Which agency is that? The one Stephen Fitzgerald had been given seventy-two hours earlier.

To be precise about what this is and isn't: as superintendent, Stephen Fitzgerald was management, not a union member. He didn't personally collect a bargaining right out of the carve-out. The point is narrower and harder to explain away — while the legislature his two sons controlled was turning every other corner of state government upside down, the agency that had just been handed to their father was written into the safe list.

Why the carve-out is the whole lawsuit

Act 10's exemptions were never clean, and that's what has kept it in litigation.

State law recognizes 22 "protective occupations." Act 10 exempted seven of them. Capitol police, University of Wisconsin police and conservation wardens were left out — officers who, as the circuit court found, "have the same authority and do the same work as law enforcement officers and state patrol troopers and inspectors" who were exempted.

The unions' argument, as reported by PBS Wisconsin, is that the line was drawn politically: the groups that got the exemption had endorsed Walker in the 2010 election, and the groups that didn't, didn't. In 2024, Dane County Judge Jacob Frost agreed that the split was irrational and violated equal protection. The appeals court reversed him twelve days ago. The Supreme Court will likely have the last word.

Fifteen years, and Wisconsin still doesn't have a settled answer about whether Scott Fitzgerald's signature law is constitutional — because of how the exemptions were drawn.

He's still taking money from the unions he exempted

Fitzgerald left the legislature for Congress in 2021, but the arrangement travels.

This election cycle, his campaign has taken $4,500 from the Milwaukee Police Association's federal PAC — a police union of exactly the kind Act 10 spared, with its most recent check dated June 15, 2026.

Teachers' unions, whose members lost their bargaining rights under his law, are not on his donor list.

The habit

This is the same man who, after Wisconsin voters elected Democrats to every statewide office in 2018, led a lame-duck session that stripped powers from the incoming governor and attorney general and cut early in-person voting — a provision a federal judge struck down. It's the same man who, this summer, told the Green Bay Packers that their concerns about his push to rewrite the NFL's broadcast law were "laughable."

The through-line isn't ideology. It's that Scott Fitzgerald has spent a quarter century deciding who gets left inside the rope, and has never once had to explain the choice to the people left outside it.

Act 10 took bargaining rights from a school secretary in West Bend. It did not take them from the State Patrol. Wisconsin's courts have been arguing about why for fifteen years.