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.
According to Stateline.org, most governors (43) have ""line-item"" veto power that allows them to reject an entire bill or individual items of the bill. Twelve governors can apply a ""reduction"" veto to reduce spending on a project, and eight governors can exercise an ""amendatory"" veto to rewrite bills and send them back to the legislature. The Wisconsin governor's partial veto acts as a powerful combination of all three.
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. According to an article in WisBar by Madison area attorney Frederick B. Wade, the breadth of the partial veto power in Wisconsin has ""permitted governors to spend or transfer more than $2.7 billion of public funds since 1988 without the approval of the legislature.""
According to Wade, in 1991 Gov. Tommy Thompson deleted parts of a sentence to appropriate funds to school tax credit that cost the state $1.2 billion over four years. In 2003, Gov. Doyle eliminated parts of two sentences to allocate $703,102,200 for distribution to municipalities. Neither measure was approved by the legislature.
These examples are ""just the tip of an enormous iceberg,"" and according to Wade ""Wisconsin governors have used partial vetoes to create hundreds of laws that the legislature did not approve.""
However, Wade does not support the upcoming amendment because it would only prohibit the combining and creating of new sentences and wouldn't eliminate the lawmaking power of the partial veto. This would still bestow the Wisconsin governor with one of the strongest veto powers in the nation and fail to correct a contradiction in the Wisconsin Constitution, according to Wade.
He argues that the governor will maintain lawmaking ability independent from the legislature with the partial veto, violating the Constitution's command that ""the legislative power shall be vested in a senate and assembly.""
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 acknowledged the amendment is not ""a slashing diminution of power,"" but unlike Wade, he said Wisconsin can't afford to waste this opportunity and still supports the bill as an essential starting point.
""The urgency for it to happen this time is that this requires passage into consecutive sessions of the legislature, and that's now been done and that's a four year process,"" Heck said. ""To just scrap it means we would be back at home plate starting from scratch again, and there would be no curtailment at all of the governor's veto authority. Frankly, the general consensus amongst most people is that we can't afford to do that.""
Considering its wide bipartisan support, most legislators expected and supported the amendment's easy passage, but because the governor of Wisconsin will still maintain one of the most powerful veto powers in the United States, don't expect ""Frankenstein's"" monstrous budget abuses, or this issue, to remain banished forever.
