Photo credit: Phil Roeder
Since 1930, Wisconsin governors have had strong veto powers allowing them to veto portions of laws passed by the Legislature. But it took more than 40 years before Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey got the idea in 1973 of vetoing a single digit—2—from $25 million in highway bonding authority, reducing it to $5 million.
That simple change opened the floodgates for far more radical revisions in legislation led by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, who became the master of using vetoes to completely rewrite the intent of the Legislature. Thompson didn’t just veto numbers. He vetoed words, parts of sentences, whole paragraphs and individual letters in a long string of words to create brand-new anagrams spelling out policies legislators never discussed.
Thompson’s extreme tactics became known as Vanna White vetoes after the blonde letter-turner on “Wheel of Fortune,” and Frankenstein vetoes after the monster created by patching together body parts from different sources.
Despite Thompson’s history of using vetoes to chop apart budget provisions like a crazed ax murderer, the former governor now says he supports a constitutional amendment proposed by Republican legislators to reign in the veto power Democratic Gov. Tony Evers used to add $65 million to new spending for public education now totaling $570 million. The irony is Evers is trying to move the state back to two-thirds funding of public education that began under Thompson in those bygone days before Republicans and Gov. Scott Walker started gutting funding for public schools by more than a billion dollars.
“Even though I am the record holder of vetoes, I’m not going to criticize a governor who vetoes,” Thompson said, “but there’s one area I do not believe the governor should be able to veto and that’s to increase appropriations. That’s left up to the Legislature.”
GOP Desperate to Block Progress
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Sorry, Tommy, but you’re famous for a veto in the 1991-1992 budget you used to increase a $35,000 appropriation by the Legislature to a mind-boggling new appropriation of $319,305,000 for a fund reimbursing municipalities for tax credits claimed by local property owners. All you had to do was veto lots of words in between a bunch of unrelated numbers. Until the Legislature got around to amending that legislation four years later, Wisconsin had spent $1.2 billion for a purpose “the Legislature plainly did not approve, in fact did not consider, let alone enact,” according to Madison attorney Fred Wade, a long-time critic of how governors have abused their veto authority. That was just one of the 13 times Thompson used vetoes to increase taxpayer spending and bonding authority by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those Vanna White and Frankenstein vetoes Thompson used to massacre legislation were finally ended by a constitutional amendment, a process requiring passage by two successive sessions of the Legislation followed by voter approval in a statewide referendum. Voters joined legislative Democrats to dump Vanna, eliminating Thompson’s veto of individual letters creating new words in 1990. In 2008, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor, voters helped Republican legislators finally slay Frankenstein, which both Doyle and Thompson had used to cross out “words and numbers to create a new sentence from two or more sentences.”
Republicans turned against Thompson’s Frankenstein veto after Doyle used it to transfer $427 million from the state’s transportation fund to increase funding for public schools. There’s something about Democrats spending taxpayer money on public education for all children that infuriates Republicans. They much prefer diverting money from public schools into private voucher schools that only a select group of children can attend.
Since the most radical abuses of the gubernatorial veto have already been eliminated, the latest Republican proposal to reduce Evers’ veto power further is simply a continuation of Republicans removing powers from the governor’s office when it’s occupied by a Democrat. That process began in the lame-duck session last year after Republicans lost every statewide election.
Republicans don’t appear to have much confidence they’ll ever again win the governorship. They have a much better chance of continuing control of both houses of the Legislature since the Republican-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court recently gave state legislatures permission to corruptly gerrymander legislative districts to their hearts’ content. That’s what Wisconsin Republicans did when they had total control of state government under Walker. But it was still nearly impossible for Republicans to redistrict dishonestly enough to win the two-thirds legislative majority required to override vetoes by the governor.
With a corrupt Republican majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court on their side, Republican legislators are now desperate to do anything they can to weaken Evers’ veto power before the next legislative redistricting after the 2020 census. It will be difficult for Republicans to succeed when less than a majority supports them statewide.
Like those thousands of marchers surrounding the Capitol during Walker’s governorship used to chant: “This is what democracy looks like!”
