MADISON – Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his broad partial veto authority this week to sign into law a new state budget that increases funding for public schools for the next four centuries.
The surprise move will ensure districts’ state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425, creating a permanent annual stream of new revenue for public schools and potentially curbing a key debate between Democrats and Republicans during each state budget-writing cycle.
Evers told reporters at a press conference in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday his action would “provide school districts with predictable long-term increases for the foreseeable future.”
Evers crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a “20” from a reference to the 2024-25 school year. The increase of $325 per student is the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.
Evers also vetoed a tax cut for the wealthiest citizens and a plan to remove DEI jobs from the University of Wisconsin system.
I hope that his intention was to shine a spotlight on the absurdity of the Wisconsin governor’s partial veto authority, because that’s the entire net effect this is going to have.
Wouldn’t a governor want to keep a partial veto to give himself more options in how to enact legislation? If I was in his place, I’d rather be able to pick and choose what parts of a bill become law than all-or-nothing.
He might be principled enough to realize just how dangerous this level of power would be in the wrong hands, and prudent enough to realize that the governorship will eventually fall into the wrong hands.
I’m a Democrat. I believe in properly funding schools. But the Democratic governor of Wisconsin just did something that to me objectively seems like an abuse of his line item veto power.
He crossed out punctuation and digits to allow for increases in school budgets for the next 400 years. I have to wonder if this will even stand up to any court challenges.
Yeah…there are countless ways this could be ripe for abuse.
In the future, when a Republican is governor…a bill may say, “Police funding shall be increased by 12.00%”…and the governor would conveniently do away with the period to make it 1200%.
I can’t get behind this. Greg Abbott has used the same kind of abuse of his line-item veto authority in Texas to rewrite what the Legislature passed in the budget. Doing things like striking specific words from the bill’s language to make it have the opposite meaning. The line-item veto is intended to allow a Governor to strike specific spending items, not to rewrite legislation. But a combination of poorly-drafted constitutional language and a Texas Legislature and courts that are absolutely supine to Abbott’s gross abuses of his power lets him get away with it.
Alas, like Pokémon, the line-item veto is a 90s fad that continues to have a deleterious impact on our society and culture.
Creative use of the partial veto has been an issue in Wisconsin for decades, and neither of the constitutional amendments on the issue actually did away with this power, they just nibbled away at it by imposing additional rules that the governor had to follow (like not combining separate sentences and not deleting individual letters). So, if Wisconsin wanted a boring old line-item veto like 40+ other states have, it would presumably have one by now. States haven’t been shy about rote copying-and-pasting of constitutional features from other states (49 of our laboratories of democracy have ~identical legislative structures), so the fact that Wisconsin has pointedly not done this after multiple decades tells me that this is somehow seen as a desirable feature. Most of the stupid things in state constitutions are boring; this is at least occasionally fun. And so long as the legislature is so lacking in legitimacy (hopefully not for much longer!), I’m not going to complain about a usurpation of legislative powers.
Honestly, I’d have been a lot more OK if he had just vetoed away the ending date entirely (though even that is probably still more power than any governor ought to have). This, though, is just silly games. When your power depends on the precise formatting that the legislature used, rather than on the content of the laws, that’s a sign that something is seriously wrong.
No no no, that would be silly. The governor used to be able to do that, but can’t any more.
There was a constitutional amendment to take away the governor’s power to delete letters. And another one to provide that deletions can only occur within a sentence. This veto only affects whole words, numerals, and punctuation marks within a single sentence.
I am saddened that they did away with this before an enterprising governor struck out all the letters of a bill aside from “Make Governor Whatsit King of Wisconsin”.
This context changes things quite a but: if playing games with line-item vetos is an established part of Wosconsin politics, then hell yes, this is funny and awesome.