Last summer, Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany voted for a massive tax giveaway to billionaires, paid for by cuts to health care for seniors and working people, as well as food assistance for children. Now, Tiffany’s campaign for governor is being fueled by millions of dollars in campaign contributions from a handful of MAGA billionaires.
A look back at Tiffany’s decades-long career in politics shows this was not the only time he sold out the people of Wisconsin to cash in on support from the wealthy and special interests.
As a member of Congress, Tiffany worked with a cabal of election deniers to try to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in court and by voting against certifying the votes of millions of Americans. More recently he refused to acknowledge the 2020 election result, and even backed paying off January 6 insurrectionists with our tax dollars. And sure enough, Illinois billionaire and underwriter of MAGA election denialism, Dick Uihlein, has doled out $7.5 million so far this year to support Tiffany.
In the state legislature, Tiffany voted for the largest cuts to public education in state history, including slashing over $20 million from schools in the district he was elected to represent. He also voted to send hundreds of millions more in funding to private voucher schools and to give a $30 million tuition tax break for wealthy people already sending their children to private schools. When campaign time came around, the special interest private school voucher industry spent big money to keep Tiffany in office with big individual donations and hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ads.
When mining special interests wanted to change state laws to loosen regulations and boost their bottom line, Tom Tiffany was there for them. And when the state’s big business lobby wanted another tax giveaway, Tiffany authored the bill that would have given it to them, and stuck local property taxpayers with the $270 million tab. Is it any wonder that Tiffany got elected to the state senate thanks in part to the largesse of these same special interests?
Tom Tiffany didn’t just play along to get along. It’s even more outrageous, because he worked to rig the system even more to make it even easier for the billionaires and big corporate special interests to elect legislators to do their bidding and get their way.
As a member of the state senate, Tiffany voted to change Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws to allow the wealthy and corporations to make unlimited donations to political parties and campaign committees. He also took it a step further, authoring the law to exempt politicians like himself from certain investigations of corruption.
Tom Tiffany has repeatedly sold out the working people and middle class in Wisconsin for the benefit of the billionaires and special interests that fund his campaigns. It’s not an accident or a coincidence. It’s a decades-long pattern of behavior.
