By Evan Vorpahl

An arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, dubbed the “Judicial Fairness Initiative” (RSLC-JFI), has spent at least $2 million dollars to aid the election ambitions of Brad Schimel for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Mailers sent to Wisconsinites from the group implore voters to “[d]eliver President Trump a mandate by electing Brad Schimel for Supreme Court.”

RSLC-JFI is targeting Wisconsin’s highest court to try to get control in a state where abortion rights, access to the ballot, fair maps, and labor rights issues will be decided by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Pending before the court is a case to decide whether an 175+ year old statue criminalizing abortion, adopted decades before women had the right to vote, will be reinstated. 

In prior Wisconsin Supreme Court races, RSLC-JFI’s million-dollar cash bombs, which funded attack ads smearing judicial candidates backed by progressive advocates, were timed for right before the general election. RSLC-JFI dropped these cash bombs after RSLC-JFI received similar sums from a key dark money conduit in the court-packing network of anti-abortion powerbroker Leonard Leo.

What You Should Know about RSLC-JFI

RSLC Is Funded by Anti-Abortion Powerbroker Leonard Leo’s Network

• RSLC’s largest donor in recent years is the Concord Fund/JCN, a 501(c)(4) closely tied to Leo, who helms a billion dollar trust fund. Leo has worked for decades to impose his views against abortion rights, gay rights, and regulating corporations as binding law through the courts, including by playing a key role in capturing our U.S. Supreme Court. Watchdog groups have raised concerns that he is personally profiting from non-profits to which he steers money, which he denies. Those nonprofits then pay his for-profit group, CRC Advisors, for consulting, an arrangement that has been subject to investigation by the D.C. Attorney General.

• RSLC-JFI has a strategic playbook for capturing state supreme courts. RSLC frequently transfers large sums to RSLC-JFI shortly after receiving similarly sized contributions from the Concord Fund after the primary election reporting periods. RSLC-JFI then typically reserves ad time and creates ads about a month before the general election, although those big ad buys are not required to be disclosed until the ads run, right before the election. In many cases, RSLC has launched a barrage of ads just days before voters headed to the polls, scorching the opponents of RSLC-JFI’s preferred candidate who cannot themselves raise enough money—and have little time—to counter such last-minute attacks designed to aid RSLC’s preferred candidates.
  
• An investigation in 2022 found that nonprofits connected to Leo spent over $31 million targeting judicial seats in 42 states between 2010 and 2022. The Concord Fund (also known as the Judicial Crisis Network or JCN) gave $2.8 million to RSLC in 2024 alone; that year RSLC-JFI spent at least $3.8 million in state judicial races in Michigan, Montana, Ohio and Texas. Information about any group underwriting RSLC’s ads in Wisconsin will likely not be made public until months after the election, because the groups are only required to file reports with the IRS on a semi-annual basis in odd-numbered years.
  
• Leo and the Federalist Society have long sought to capture state supreme courts, and Wisconsin’s in particular. In 2007, the Federalist Society hired former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway’s polling company and launched a media campaign that in effect aided Annette Ziegler’s bid for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. In subsequent years, the Leo-tied JCN has funded groups, such as Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, that have flooded the state with ads backing right-wing judicial candidates.
• In 2019, RSLC-JFI also bragged that its last-minute cash bomb of $1.3 million helped Scott Walker-appointee Judge Brian Hagedorn come from behind to defeat Judge Lisa Neubauer for the Wisconsin Supreme Court by fewer than 6,000 votes. Following its usual playbook, the Leo-tied JCN gave $1 million to RSLC just days before RSLC moved a similar amount to RSLC-JFI. RSLC-JFI then began commissioning ads calling the anti-abortion activist Hagedorn a “rule of law” judge and disparaging the well-regarded Judge Neubauer, who had the support of numerous other judges, as a “liberal.”

Other RSLC Funders Include Right-Wing Dark Money Groups and Billionaires

• There is no limit on how much RSLC, as an IRS 527 group, can receive from such dark money shell groups, corporations, or billionaires. From 2020 through 2024, JCN/Concord Fund gave RSLC $7.9 million, outpacing all other funders. But the group has also taken in large contributions from Nevada billionaire Miriam Adelson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Charles Koch’s Koch Industries, and other huge corporations.
  
• While many major funders are not local, RSLC took in $200,000 in 2020 from billionaire Diane Hendricks, the richest woman in Wisconsin. Hendricks is a GOP megadonor who has backed far-right politicians and political issues in the state. This year, Hendricks has also given   over $1 million to the state Republican Party in 2025, which in turn has provided over $1.6 million to Schimel’s campaign committee. 

State Judges Are Key to RSLC’s Partisan Gerrymandering Tactics

• Between 2012 and 2023, Wisconsin had some of the most undemocratic electoral maps in the country, allowing Republicans to dominate the state legislature even though Wisconsin is one of the most competitive states in statewide elections where the voting map for the president, the U.S. Senate, the governor and the state attorney general is the state. Wisconsin’s election maps were ruled to have violated the state constitution in December 2023, after Judge Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the Court. Wisconsin now has maps that are much more representative, though Republicans still have a slight advantage under the compromise map drawing supported by Gov. Tony Evers. RSLC has focused nationally on backing judicial candidates to defend maps drawn to secure safe Republican seats in the legislatures, regardless of the proportion of voters who vote for Democratic candidates in statewide races.
   
• RSLC, which has long led efforts to gerrymander states in Republicans’ favor, is working nationwide to protect Republican-drawn maps, in anticipation of the next presidential election and the next round of redistricting following the 2030 Census.
  
• RSLC is notorious for its 2010 Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP), which targeted state legislatures to secure GOP control in order to deploy grossly gerrymandered voting maps that destroyed fair representation in several legislatures, including Wisconsin’s. RSLC’s REDMAP success also unleashed an array of controversial bills attacking unions and reproductive rights. Notably, in 2022, RSLC-JFI bragged about its “significant impact on the redistricting process” after helping elect state court judges. (The executive director of RSLC’s 2010 REDMAP project, Chris Jankowski, has served as an adviser to JCN over the years and is also the settlor of Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust. Jankowski also previously led Elon Musk’s “Building America Together,” which is currently flooding Wisconsin with deceptive ads that are assailing Schimel’s judicial opponent, Susan Crawford.)

For additional information about this article, please contact Evan Vorpahl at evan@truenorthresearch.org. True North’s Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen contributed to this article.