Wisconsin GOP leader Rep. Jim Steineke to resign Wednesday

A GOP leader who was not seeking reelection says he will resign from the Wisconsin state Assembly on Wednesday.

Rep. Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, was elected in the Republican wave of 2010. He joined party leadership in 2013 as assistant majority leader and became majority leader in 2015, the second-ranking position in the Assembly behind the speaker. Republicans hold nearly a 2-to-1 advantage there.

In January, he said he would not seek reelection. In a new statement Monday morning, Steineke said he would resign to seek private-sector work “now that it is clear that there will likely be no further legislative sessions” this year.

Steineke is one of a record number of retirements in Wisconsin’s Legislature this year. Three Republicans competing for the nomination to the 5th District seat he held include: Joy Goeben, Tim Greenwood and Kraig Knaack. One Democrat, Joseph Van Deurzen, is running in the district.

Like many Wisconsin Republicans, Steineke did not initially support Donald Trump for president in 2016. In March 2016, he called Trump a “morally bankrupt con man” and urged Republicans not to support him in the presidential primaries. Steineke did not attend the GOP convention that year, but he mostly supported Trump’s presidency. In 2019, he was part of a group of Republican leaders who greeted Trump at the airport in a visit to Green Bay.

In a February 2020 podcast interview, Steineke said Trump’s presidency had been “a mixed bag.”

“The policies that he’s put forward, the direction that he’s taking the country, by and large I agree with,” Steineke said. “But just like anybody else, any other politician, I’m going to have differences of opinion. I really push back against this idea that we seem to have in our culture now where you’re either 100 percent with us or 100 percent against us. … I think that’s one of the things that’s really damaging to our country.”

In the days after Democrat Joe Biden won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, Steineke called Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in Milwaukee “misinformation.” But Steineke also supported the creation of a special counsel that is still investigating such claims at taxpayer expense.

In March, Steineke indirectly criticized that effort, led by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, pledging to “do everything possible to stop any effort to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections.”

“In a world where partisan divides are deep and seemingly anything can be justified as long as it results in retaining power, handing authority to partisan politicians to determine if election fraud exists would be the end of our republic as we know it,” Steineke wrote on Twitter.

It wasn’t the only time in his political career that Steineke sought to distance himself from what he saw as extreme factions. In 2020, in response to a broad-based social justice movement, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos named Steineke a co-chair of a bipartisan task force on policing and racial disparities in Wisconsin. Months later, the online news outlet UpNorthNews obtained an email Steineke had sent to Vos that laid out his thinking about the position. The candid message offers an unusual window into a top lawmaker’s view of the job.

Leading the task force, Steineke wrote, is likely a “political loser,” but one he was willing to take on because he had no higher political ambitions beyond, he wrote, possibly running for Outagamie County Executive.

Whoever chaired the committee, Steineke wrote Vos, “you’d have to trust them not to be too malleable or too intransigent. Tough needle to thread.”

He then pitched the task force as a way to make inroads with Democratic-leaning voters and, he said, draw contrasts with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. And he offered a frank assessment of the Legislature’s work.

“We probably need to pick some things that we can get bipartisan agreement on early in the next session,” he wrote, “since we all know not much will get done after the budget is signed.”

As it turned out, the task force unveiled 18 recommendations in April 2021. Four of them became law, including a near-ban on chokeholds by police and the creation of a yearly state report on the use of force by police agencies.

Steineke has not announced his private-sector job. It is common for retiring lawmakers to work as lobbyists after leaving the Legislature.

In his statement Monday, Steineke said “it has been an honor to be trusted by the people of the 5th District to represent their voices in Madison.”