The partial, or line-item, veto idea was one of those inexplicably popular fads that you see everywhere for a while then never hear about again till the nostalgia sets in and it gets another day in the sun. It’s come and gone from the discourse several times throughout U.S. history.
I vaguely remember a lot of blather about it from way back when Newt Gingrich was in the news all the time.
But it’s a really, really bad idea.
Seriously, a truly spectacularly bad idea.
The basic concept is that an executive with a veto over legislative actions could also be given the power to veto parts of a bill rather than the whole thing.
Of course, a power like this makes all the negotiating involved in writing and passing a bill through the legislature totally pointless since the executive can just edit out the bits they don’t like.
Or, if you go full-on pathological with how you implement a partial veto power, they can just re-write the bill entirely.
It made for some amusing what-if kinda scenarios, but was obviously a tremendously stupid concept.
But apparently some states have actually tried it out.
I know: shocker; the laboratories of democracy do try some genuinely foolish experiments.
Some went with a limited line-item veto over spending bills only, so the executive could only nope out of specific budget items as individual vetoes.
Still stupid and means legislative budget wrangling is pointless but relatively harmless, and totally safe except in budget contexts.
But Wisconsin went nearly all-in on the stupid.
The Wisconsin version of the partial veto allowed the executive to delete single characters from any spending bill, effectively allowing almost-complete rewrites as long as they were done exclusively with the delete key on the Governor’s keyboard. At least it was only on spending bills.
Which could have been worse but is still completely squirrel poop levels of nuts.
And it’s been almost 100 years since they did this, and governors have actually used this power before without it making a national news splash.
I cannot believe this didn’t immediately explode in their faces.
But it has now.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court just upheld as constitutional a bill that had originally allocated a specific bit of funding for two years but that the governor had edited to apply for 400 years.
Seriously, he turned the phrase “for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year” into “for 2023-2425”.
The balls on this guy.
And now the state Supreme Court has upheld that edit.
So, to be clear: Wisconsin is now definitively in a situation where the governor can make pretty much any spending decisions they want, as long as they only delete from the text the legislature sends them.
They should probably fix this now.
And the rest of us should go double-check our state constitutions to make sure we don’t have this particular land-mine of stupid waiting in there for us too.
