It all began with a troll.
Elections have consequences. One of the consequences associated with the Democrats’ retention of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s majority is that Badger State voters may be subject to an utterly lawless and arbitrary taxation regime into the unforeseeably distant future.
It all began with a troll. A quirky feature of Wisconsin’s state constitution provides the governor with the power of partial veto — a mechanism that allows the governor to unilaterally amend legislation by striking words, numbers, or even punctuation from statute, even in ways that wholly alter the legislature’s intent. Governors of both parties have used (and misused) this authority in the past, but Democratic Governor Tony Evers took this power to a new and shockingly contemptuous level.
Last summer, Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature sent a school funding bill for the 2024-25 school year to the governor’s desk. Evers simply scratched out the “20” and the hyphen so the bill would fund the Wisconsin school system until the year 2425. With a sigh and a wink last week, the liberal-led Supreme Court found no abuses of the governor’s constitutional authority in this maneuver.
“We are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” read the majority opinion written by Justice Jill Karofsky. “However, our constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”
The 4–3 decision was a party-line ruling, and Karofsky’s conservative counterparts were not convinced that the state’s constitution sanctions Evers’s caprice.
“Instead of reading what the bills actually say, and construing the partial veto power accordingly, this court treats bills presented to the governor as simply a set of alphanumeric ingredients from which the governor can cook up whatever he pleases,” read Justice Brian Hagedorn’s dissent. Not only did the Wisconsin Supreme Court abandon a “reasonable reading” of the state constitution, it redefined the word “veto.” Even the so-called “Vanna White veto” is “still at root the power to influence legislation by subtraction, not addition.” It is the “power to say ‘no,’” Hagedorn observed; “it logically cannot be the power to create.”
Wisconsin Republicans are not above abusing this power. Former Governor Scott Walker, for example, amended a 2017 state budget bill so that it would transform a one-year moratorium on referenda aimed at raising taxes to fund green energy projects into an absurd 1,000-year deferment. But that gets at Hagedorn’s point about the very concept of the veto. Walker used it to circumscribe what the government is allowed to do, whereas Evans has used it to license governmental activity that the legislature had not sanctioned. It’s hard to believe that the founding generation would not regard that as the arbitrary and, thus, tyrannical exercise of power.
Indeed, by granting the governor authority over the next four centuries of school funding, the Wisconsin Supreme Court might have consigned Badger Staters to an autocratic system of taxation. “The increased spending authority permitted under Evers’ veto allows schools to get the money from property taxes if there’s not enough state aid,” the Associated Press reported.
If there is a silver lining in this, it may be that the governor’s comically insolent abuse of his powers could finally convince Wisconsin’s voters to do away with the partial veto via the amendment process. But that, too, would be a result of electoral outcomes, and Wisconsin’s voters would have to want what Republicans are pitching. After all, voters in this country tend to get what they want — good and hard, in this case.