Budget shenanigans

[kurumi]

In the past, Wisconsin's governor has had the powerful ability to edit a bill at signoff by combining and omitting letters and words to create new sentences. The terms "Vanna White Veto" and "Frankenstein Veto" have been used in the past.

In Wisconsin's 2005-2007 budget bill, the governor used this to transfer $427 million (or $127 million?) from the transportation fund to the general fund. The edited portion of the bill:

... the department of transportation shall ... transfer ... to the ... general ... fund ... from ... the transportation fund ... in the 2005-2007 fiscal biennium ... $1 ... 2 ... 7 ... 0 ... 00 ... 000 ...

Story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03wisconsin.html?ex=1364875200&en=b026e72d53a0aa9f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Analysis with an illustration that's hard to believe:
https://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2008/04/i-love-state-po.html

Did we all have to wait another 2 years for Interstate 41? Are any of these veto tricks still in effect? I don't know, but maybe Wisconsinites on the forum do.

[Big John]

The most onerous "Vanna White" vetoes were made unconstitional in 1990 https://apnews.com/article/febb8e4c5bc29f9e461b74c779d7e794 .  It forbade vetoing indevotional letters, but still allowed vetoing individual numerals and individual words.

[SEWIGuy]

As with everything in Wisconsin these days, the Supreme Court limited this ability further but gave no real precedent for why.  So expect more vetoes from Evers in the next spending bill, a couple of which could be declared unconstitutional.

https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-supreme-court-strikes-down-3-evers-vetoes

This state is such a mess.  The legislative process is used mostly for show.  The real work is done behind the scenes.  The Court ultimately settles it.

[triplemultiplex]

In my opinion, the line-item veto is unconstitutional because it puts too much power in the hands of the governor.  But crossing out individual words instead of entire sections of a bill takes it to a whole new level of dumb.  That wasn't even the intent of this power.  It was seen as a way to have a check on those delicious little earmarks legislators were so fond of to coax their colleagues to vote on something.  The intent was never to play word search to create whatever you can.

An otherwise highly regarded governor took this 'mad libs' veto to the next level 30 years ago when his party was out of power in the legislature.  And ever since, this has become painfully common.  Especially in times like these when one party has a (gerrymandered) majority in the legislature and the other party holds the governor's seat.

So when these shenanigans fall to Wisconsin's Supreme Court, it is then decided by a group of people who mostly got their jobs in very off-cycle, low turnout elections.

For a deeper dive on the history of Wisconsin's line item veto, Wisconsin Public Television has a nice little recap:
https://www.wiscontext.org/story-wisconsins-singular-partial-veto
Plenty of blame to go around, politically.