Wisconsin’s state government is profoundly unserious. State Democrats have decided they are fine with the governor being an emperor with magical powers to rewrite legislation to fit his agenda.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed this view, upholding a “veto” by Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) on an education bill. In 2023, the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill that would increase spending on education by $325 per student for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years. More specifically, the law said, “For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325 to the result under par. (b).”
Evers then used his line-item veto power to strike individual characters out of the law. More specifically, he struck out the “24” from “2023-2024,” the words in between the two specified dates, and the “20” and the hyphen in “2024-25.” The result was the following: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325 to the result under par. (b).”
In other words, Evers used the state’s two-year budget to turn a two-year increase in school funding into a 402-year increase. All of this was deemed above board by the liberal justices who make up the majority on the state Supreme Court.
The problem is that they may be right. Wisconsin’s partial veto powers have been authoritarian for decades, requiring multiple attempts by state politicians to close loopholes opened with each governor’s abuse of that power. That includes a previous amendment that prevented the governor from striking out individual letters to create new words, which Evers argued didn’t apply to him since he was striking out individual numbers to create new numbers. Former Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) did something similar during his tenure in 2017, changing “December 31, 2018” to “December 3018.”
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For a Democratic Party that has spent the past decade wailing about GOP “threats to democracy,” Evers and his fellow Wisconsin Democrats seem perfectly fine with rewriting legislation to impose on residents hundreds of years into the future. Republicans aided in this process as well, though, and the result is an empowered governor (who faces no term limits) forcing a legislature elected to write laws to spend more time running in circles, working around all the possible ways the governor can abuse his power.
This kind of tit-for-tat escalation of executive power is exactly what we should be trying to avoid as a country, and it is something to keep in mind as our federal government funnels more power to the executive branch. But Wisconsin has managed to fast-track that decline in the balance of power with the ridiculous powers it has let its governor keep for decades, making its state government one of the biggest jokes in the country.