Gov. Scott Walker will give his seventh “state of the state” speech on Tuesday.

His party has power as he offers plans

Madison — On Tuesday, Gov. Scott Walker will lay out more of what he wants to do with Wisconsin conservatives’ biggest hold on power in a generation.

Making his seventh “state of the state” speech, the Republican governor will speak to a Legislature with more members of his party than at any time since at least 1971. Walker and GOP lawmakers also will have allies in a GOP Congress and President-elect Donald Trump as they seek to drug-test food stamp recipients, expand taxpayer-funded private voucher schools and charge higher premiums for risk takers such as smokers in state BadgerCare health coverage for the needy.

But Walker and Republicans also face challenges such as whether to delay road projects or raise taxes to close a nearly $1 billion shortfall in the road fund over the next two years.

For the first time in recent memory, Walker will deliver the speech at 3 p.m. in the Assembly chamber rather than in the evening out of respect to President Barack Obama, who is giving his farewell address in Chicago Tuesday evening.

Walker’s speech can be watched online on Wisconsin Eye or on Milwaukee Public Television.

A Marquette Law School Poll in November found that 42% of the state approved of Walker’s job as governor and 51% disapproved, while 52% approved of Obama’s performance and 44% disapproved.

Both Walker and Obama are likely to talk Tuesday about the improvement in the economy that has happened during their time in office.

Between December 2010, the month before Walker took office, and December 2015 — the most recent month available for detailed data — Wisconsin created 168,200 private-sector jobs. That five-year mark was short of the 250,000 jobs that Walker had promised to create in his first four-year term.

Wisconsin’s unemployment rate, which was at 4.1% for November, is below the national level of 4.6% for the same month and has fallen by more than half over Walker’s time in office.

For both the state and federal government, a big question is how the GOP will move forward on its pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, which covers millions of people nationwide and hundreds of thousands of people in Wisconsin.

In this state alone, the Affordable Care Act’s private insurance exchange provides health coverage to 224,000 people, many of them in rural areas that tend to vote Republican.

Walker has said he wants Obamacare quickly repealed but to leave a period of one to two years for Republicans to pass and transition the country into a replacement plan.

“We believe that the transition should be a reasonable time whether ... it’s a year, a year and a half or two years,” Walker said in November.

But in a recent interview with the policy website Vox.com, Obama rejected that approach, saying Republicans should have to show what their replacement is before repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“I am saying to every Republican right now, if you, in fact, can put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what Obamacare is doing, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with your plan. But I want to see it first,” the president told interviewers Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff.

Whatever happens in Washington, D.C., and Madison with the health-care overhaul, Republicans will largely decide.

In the 99-member state Assembly, Republicans have a 6435 seat majority, their largest since 1957. In the 33-member Senate, the GOP holds a 20-13 majority, its largest since 1971.

To start this legislative period, Walker called last week for a special session to fight heroin addiction and ordered state agencies to ramp up their response to a drug that kills hundreds in Wisconsin each year.

The governor is calling on lawmakers to pass anti-heroin bills recommended by a task force headed by state Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette) and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch. Kit Beyer, a spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (RRochester), said that these bills were still being drafted and that they might get committee review later this month, with floor votes the week of Feb. 6 at the earliest.