Wisconsin governor’s 400-year veto spurs challenge before state Supreme Court

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ creative use of his expansive veto power in an attempt to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years comes before the state Supreme Court on Wednesday.

A key question facing the liberal-controlled court is whether state law allows governors to strike digits to create a new number as Evers did with the veto in question.

The case, supported by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long fight over just how broad Wisconsin’s governor’s partial veto powers should be. The issue has crossed party lines, with Republicans and Democrats pushing for more limitations on the governor’s veto over the years.

In this case, Evers made the veto in question in 2023. His partial veto increased how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student by $325 a year until 2425. Evers took language that originally applied the $325 increase for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years and instead vetoed the “20” and the hyphen to make the end date 2425, more than four centuries from now.

“The veto here approaches the absurd and exceeds any reasonable understanding of legislative or voter intent in adopting the partial veto or subsequent limits,” attorneys for legal scholar Richard Briffault, of Columbia Law School, said in a filing with the court ahead of arguments.

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The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center, which handles lawsuits for the state’s largest business lobbying group, filed the lawsuit arguing that Evers’ veto was unconstitutional. The Republican-controlled Legislature supports the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks the court to strike down Evers’ partial veto and declare that the state constitution forbids the governor from striking digits to create a new year or to remove language to create a longer duration than the one approved by the Legislature.

Finding otherwise would give governors “unlimited power” to alter numbers in a budget bill, the attorneys who brought the lawsuit argued in court filings.

Evers, his attorneys counter, was simply using a longstanding partial veto process to ensure the funding increase for schools would not end after two years.

Wisconsin’s partial veto power was created by a 1930 constitutional amendment, but it’s been weakened over the years, including in reaction to vetoes made by former governors, both Republicans and Democrats.

Voters adopted constitutional amendments in 1990 and 2008 that removed the ability to strike individual letters to make new words — the “Vanna White” veto — and the power to eliminate words and numbers in two or more sentences to create a new sentence — the “Frankenstein” veto.

The lawsuit before the court on Wednesday contends that Evers’ partial veto is barred under the 1990 constitutional amendment prohibiting the “Vanna White” veto, named the co-host of the game show Wheel of Fortune who flips letters to reveal word phrases.

But Evers, through his attorneys at the state Department of Justice, argued that the “Vanna White” veto ban applies only to striking individual letters to create new words, not vetoing digits to create new numbers.

Reshaping state budgets through the partial veto is a longstanding act of gamesmanship in Wisconsin between the governor and Legislature, as lawmakers try to craft bills in a way that is largely immune from creative vetoes.

Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker used his veto power in 2017 to extend the deadline of a state program from 2018 to 3018. That came to be known as the “thousand-year veto.”

Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson holds the record for the most partial vetoes by any governor in a single year — 457 in 1991. Evers in 2023 made 51 partial budget vetoes.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, then controlled by conservatives, undid three of Evers’ partial vetoes in 2020, but a majority of justices did not issue clear guidance on what was allowed. Two justices did say that partial vetoes can’t be used to create new policies.