As Wisconsin attorney general, Brad Schimel tried to kill the Affordable Care Act

In 2018, as Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general, Brad Schimel sought to get the Affordable Care Act struck down as unconstitutional. The 2010 law, enacted under President Barack Obama and commonly known as Obamacare, has protected access to affordable health insurance for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites.

Schimel, now a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge, is running in the April 1, 2025, election for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His opponent in the race is Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford.

A provision of the original Affordable Care Act required that all Americans either obtain health insurance coverage or pay a penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that individual mandate as constitutional in 2012, citing the power of Congress to enact taxes. Five years later, President Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 included a repeal of the penalty for uninsured individuals.

In April 2018, then-Attorney General Schimel helped lead a federal lawsuit brought by Texas, Wisconsin, and 18 other GOP-led states challenging the entire Affordable Care Act. Their argument was that without the individual mandate, the entire law lacked any constitutional basis. 

“Obamacare’s irrational design wreaks havoc on health insurance markets,” Schimel claimed in a press release at the time. “Obamacare causes premiums to rise and coverage to fall, forcing Wisconsin and other states to take extreme, costly measures to protect their citizens’ health and pocketbooks. I bring this challenge to Obamacare because, as Wisconsin’s attorney general, I swore to uphold the rule of law and protect our state from overreaching and harmful actions from the federal government.”

“Obamacare has been a colossal failure,” Schimel and Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a March 2018 op-ed published by the Daily Signal.

In addition to prohibiting discrimination by insurers against an estimated 883,000 individuals in Wisconsin with preexisting medical conditions, the law had already saved Americans and their government trillions of dollars in health care costs as of 2019 and has allowed more than 266,000 Wisconsinites to obtain affordable coverage through the health insurance marketplace in 2024.

Weeks after Schimel lost his November 2018 reelection race to Democrat Josh Kaul, right-wing U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that without the individual mandate, the entire ACA was unconstitutional. In a December 2018 interview, Schimel told right-wing radio host Vicki McKenna, “I’m glad he did it before I left office, so I got one more win before moving out.” O’Connor’s ruling was subsequently overturned in a 7-2 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose majority decided the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to challenge the law.

Schimel has continued to brag about his attempts to block Obamacare and other actions taken by President Barack Obama. “There were three states that primarily sued the Obama administration,” he said at a July 2024 campaign event. “And those were Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. I got a lot of people who remember that, by the way, the argument that finally won and got rid of the individual mandate on Obamacare, that came out of my attorney general’s office.”

Schimel’s office had no official role in the repeal of the mandate, which was accomplished by legislation passed in Congress.

The Schimel campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

“Brad Schimel led the charge to gut health care for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites, including those with pre-existing conditions,” Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman told the Wisconsin Independent in an email. “Even after losing his re-election campaign, he gloated that he was ‘glad’ he played a ‘leading role’ to strip away health care. On the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Schimel would work to strip away our fundamental rights and side with predatory big corporations over the people of Wisconsin.”