On the Radar
Governor could lose some power, depending on today’s vote
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by Associated Press
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Wisconsin governors would lose some of their unprecedented veto power under a constitutional amendment voters were considering Tuesday.
Voters are deciding whether Gov. Jim Doyle and his successors should be prohibited from stitching together words and numbers from multiple sentences to create policy and set taxes and spending levels never approved by lawmakers.
A majority of yes votes would amend the constitution to prohibit what critics call the “Frankenstein veto.”
Approval would be seen as a rebuke to Doyle, who has defended the power and used it to reshape budgets approved by the Legislature to his liking.
Doyle has used the power to increase aid for local communities and schools by hundreds of millions of dollars since he took office in 2003. He also rewrote last year’s budget to allow higher property tax increases than what lawmakers approved.
Rick Reyer, a 47-year-old radio station manager, voted for the constitutional change at his polling place in Wausau.
“I don’t believe the governor should have the authority to change bills or laws that have been put into place based upon a whim,” he said.
But Diane Austin, 40, said she voted against the change because the governor has had the power for years and used it to restore funding for good state programs.
“There are some good things, some good bills, that have come out of it,” said Austin, of Sun Prairie.
Unique in the nation, Wisconsin governors have the ability to approve spending bills “in whole or in part” under a 1930 constitutional amendment. Courts have said that means they can cross out individual words, digits, sentences and paragraphs to create new policies in spending bills.
But lawmakers said Doyle went too far in 2005 when he rewrote a section of the budget to divert millions of dollars of transportation money to schools.
He crossed out more than 700 words and stitched together others to create one new sentence allowing his administration to transfer $427 million out of the transportation fund. He cobbled together individual digits from five sets of numbers to come up with that figure.
The Republican-led Legislature passed the constitutional amendment outlawing the practice in the 2005-2006 session.
After Democrats took control of the Senate in the session that started last year, they delayed action for months before giving it approval in December. Constitutional amendments require approval in two straight legislative sessions and from a majority of voters to take effect.
The amendment is the second in recent decades limiting the partial-veto power as governors have increasingly taken advantage of it.
In 1990, voters banned the so-called “Vanna White veto” after Gov. Tommy Thompson crossed out letters within words to create new ones. That referendum passed with 60 percent of the vote.
Doyle was critical of the veto power when he was the attorney general but changed his tune after becoming governor. Now he calls it an important check on the Legislature and says it protected schools from harmful cuts.
Approval of the referendum would still leave Wisconsin governors with expansive veto power. The amendment would only prohibit governors from crossing out words to create a new sentence from two or more sentences.
They could still cross out words within a sentence to change its meaning; cross out individual digits in numbers to create new numbers; and reduce spending by crossing out appropriations and writing in their own lower numbers.
