With the flick of his tool he cuts, incises, conjoins and, ultimately, creates—creates what some view as an abomination of power.

The “tool” is a veto pen, the creations are changes in bills that often circumvent the power of the state legislature and “he” is the Wisconsin governor in the last two decades. The partial veto, dubbed the “Frankenstein” veto, has allowed Wisconsin governors enjoy some of the broadest powers in the United States with the ability to strike out partial sentences from fiscal legislation and join other sentences together to create entirely new meanings.

Tuesday, an overwhelming majority of Wisconsin voters voted yes to a statewide referendum to create limitations on the governor’s ability to reconstruct spending bills.

State Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls, introduced the constitutional amendment after a particularly extensive and publicized use of the partial veto by Gov. Jim Doyle in 2005. Doyle excised 752 words from a budget bill and left a 20-word sentence shifting $427 million from transportation to education, a measure never approved by the legislature.

“This resolution, what we are proposing … is basically saying the governor will be prohibited from creating a new sentences by combining two or more other sentences,” Harsdorf said. “No governor should be able to use the partial veto authority to enact laws that have not passed the legislature.”

With the approval of the referendum, Doyle and future Wisconsin governors will no longer be able to create new sentences by crossing out words or numbers from two or more existing clauses.

The amendment received strong bipartisan support before appearing on the April 1 ballot, passing with a 33-0 vote on second consideration in the Senate and a 94-1 vote in the Assembly, according to Harsdorf.

Amendment co-sponsor state Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, commended the legislature’s support of the referendum.

“For me, it’s not a partisan issue, it’s institutional,” Carpenter said. “It’s not directed toward Gov. Doyle whatsoever, it’s the powers of future governors I’m worried about.”

Despite the overwhelming support of the measure, Gov. Jim Doyle displayed less enthusiasm for the amendment, though he never officially denounced it.

“I’ve just sort of stayed out of it because it has to do with longer-term institutional relationships between the legislature … I do think people have vastly overblown what this is all about, and I think that the voters should be very careful in changing the constitution and not knowing what some of the ramifications of that might be,” Doyle said. “It’s important that the governor have a strong partial veto.”

However, Doyle has criticized the breadth of the partial veto power in the past. According to Jay Heck, executive director of the bipartisan group Common Cause in Wisconsin, Doyle was “very much for limiting the veto authority of the governor” prior to his gubernatorial election in 2003.

Doyle admitted he “[sees] the world from a different perspective now,” and abuses of executive power via the “Frankenstein” veto are not unique to his governorship.

Yet, despite the passage of the constitutional amendment Tuesday, the Wisconsin governor will still have extremely extensive veto powers.

Harsdorf admitted the governor’s power will remain vast, said she supports the partial veto despite her sponsorship of this bill, but she felt Gov. Doyle’s use of it in 2005 necessitated action.

“I support the partial veto, but I believe that was clearly an abuse of the use of the partial veto,” Harsdorf said. “The partial veto was never intended to allow a governor to enact laws that have not passed the legislature … Even with this change, our governor will still have the broadest veto authority of any governor in the nation.”

Even after the decision to limit the “Frankenstein veto” governors will still have the ability to remove single digits to create new figures or delete whole clauses from paragraphs to change their meaning.

Heck said the amendment is not “a slashing diminution of power,” but added Wisconsin can’t afford to waste this opportunity and said he supported the bill as an essential starting point.