2 Brothers Will Rule in Wisconsin

MADISON, Wis. — Like brothers anywhere, Jeff and Scott Fitzgerald tend to interrupt each other. They share season tickets to University of Wisconsin Badgers football games. They bicker, jokingly, over work — who has the larger office, the tougher hours, the more complex job.

The State Capitol here will undergo one of the most marked shifts in the nation after this month’s election, from Democratic dominance to Republican control. But another remarkable change is coming: Representative Jeff Fitzgerald was picked to be the next speaker of Wisconsin’s State Assembly, and Senator Scott Fitzgerald was chosen as majority leader of the State Senate, creating a rare fraternal alignment, experts say, for any state in recent memory.

While all sorts of relatives have served at various times in state legislatures (including husband-and-wife teams, siblings and, after this election, a mother-and-son duo among New Hampshire’s lawmakers), the Fitzgeralds’ particular circumstances as simultaneous leaders of both chambers are extremely unusual.

“A lot of people think we turn it off at home,” Representative Fitzgerald said the other day of the brothers’ propensity to talk politics and policy during daily cellphone calls, at family birthday gatherings and pretty much everywhere else they happen upon each other. “But no,” he said. “It only gets worse.”

The brothers, both conservative Republicans and veteran legislators, acknowledge that they battled as boys over the “things boys fight about,” Senator Fitzgerald said. More recently, they have cast only a few opposite votes here and there, on the state budget, for instance, and on ethanol standards.

But in a Capitol in which some Assembly leaders have barely been on speaking terms with their counterparts in the Senate, the Fitzgerald brothers are predicting particular cooperation between the chambers (even if Senator Fitzgerald persists in portraying the Assembly as “big, loud and raucous” and Representative Fitzgerald mocks the Senate for regularly heading home, so he asserts, by 2 in the afternoon).

At 47, Senator Fitzgerald is older, shorter and, even he acknowledges, more stubborn than his only brother. Representative Fitzgerald is 44, the jock of the family, and more laid back. Senator Fitzgerald followed their father, Stephen (a former sheriff of Dodge County) into politics in 1994, then Representative Fitzgerald ran a few years later — blessed with built-in name recognition that most politicians could only dream of, but mildly worried, too, that there might be “fatigue” over seeing yet another Fitzgerald on the ballot.

Representative Fitzgerald lives in Horicon, a small city 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee — and five miles from Senator Fitzgerald’s Juneau home. Senator Fitzgerald represents his brother in the Senate, while Representative Fitzgerald’s district narrowly misses his brother’s home. They tease each other during the political season (“I’ve noticed a lot of your opponent’s signs in yards!”). They also have shared a political opponent, Vittorio Spadaro, who challenged one brother in one cycle, then the other.

Come January, the Fitzgeralds, who had grown used to leading the minorities in their chambers, will lead an Assembly of 60 Republicans, 38 Democrats and an independent and a Senate with 19 Republicans and 14 Democrats. Many legislators are new. Among the Democrats who lost jobs: the current Assembly speaker and senate majority leader.

Had one chamber flipped but not the other, the Fitzgeralds would not be nearly as optimistic about what comes next. The outcome of a divided Capitol, Senator Fitzgerald said, is “horse trading instead of compromise, and you end up voting for some really bad garbage.” As it is, Representative Fitzgerald said he was preparing to reintroduce a series of jobs bills that went nowhere when Madison was run by Democrats.

Yet these will hardly be simple times. Wisconsin faces a budget gap — more than $2 billion by some estimates — and a majority of voters who were clearly searching for something other than what they had. “I’m ready for it,” Senator Fitzgerald said. “If we don’t ruffle feathers this time, I think people are going to say we’re not doing what we said we would do.”

Before their caucuses selected them this month, the Fitzgeralds worried that some might object to granting so much power to one family. “Do you think they’ll let us?” Senator Fitzgerald remembered thinking. This is a nation that hates — but also adores — its political dynasties, and the Fitzgeralds easily won.