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But even if an April referendum banning the practice is approved, Wisconsin’s governor still will have the strongest veto power in the country, an expert on state government said.
A ban on the Frankenstein veto would prohibit Wiscon-sin’s governors from combining disparate words and phrases from different sentences to stitch together new sentences in spending bills — and create new laws the Legislature never intended.
But governors would still be able to:
“Wisconsin still will have the most powerful veto (if the Frankenstein veto is banned), which makes the governor extremely powerful,” said Ed Miller, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
By a 94-1 vote — with Rep. Frank Boyle, D-Superior, the lone dissenter — the Assembly approved a resolution to ask voters whether the constitution should be amended to ban the Frankenstein veto. Voters would weigh in on the measure on the April 1 ballot, when they also will vote for a Supreme Court justice and other state and local nonpartisan races.
The proposed amendment asks whether the constitution should be changed “to prohibit the governor, in exercising his or her partial veto authority, from creating a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences of the enrolled bill?”
Approved by the state Senate in December on a 33-0 vote, the measure has no real opposition, and proponents expect it to pass.
Gov. Jim Doyle, whose controversial veto in 2005 transferring money from the state’s transportation fund to increase school spending by $330 million renewed scrutiny of the practice, and others could argue that banning it would make it harder for the governor to reduce spending, Miller said.
Matt Canter, a Doyle spokesman, didn’t return calls Tuesday.
Wisconsin governors have had partial veto power since 1931. But the veto was used sparingly in spending bills until Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey took office, according the Legislative Reference Bureau.
Lucey issued 159 vetoes between 1971 and 1977, according to the bureau. Governors who succeeded him issued even more partial vetoes until Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson set a record in 1991 with 457.
A year before that, state voters banned the so-called “Vanna White” veto, named for the “Wheel of Fortune” game show star. That veto allowed governors to delete letters or combine parts of words to form new words and sentences.
While governors still will have a lot of leeway to rewrite spending bills without the Frankenstein veto, they will be far more constrained in the extent to which they can manipulate the language, said Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, lead sponsor of the resolution putting the constitutional amendment on the ballot.
In a classic Frankenstein veto from the last budget, Doyle sifted through more than 800 words and figures over two pages to create a sentence the Legislature never intended.
“We have three branches of government,” Carpenter said. “I just don’t believe in having one of the branches having too much strength.”
Carpenter said banning the Frankenstein veto could make it more likely for lawmakers and the governor to work cooperatively on the budget rather than approach the state’s biennial spending document through the prism of partisan politics.
But Fred Wade, a Madison lawyer who has waged a sometimes lonely campaign against the amendment because he says it doesn’t go far enough, said the Legislature instead should focus on more aggressively rolling back the governor’s partial-veto powers.
“We’ve never had a debate here as to whether the governors ought to have this power,” Wade said. “We just sort of backed into it and no one’s effectively challenged it.”
Carpenter said he plans to introduce additional legislation in the future that would further limit the governor’s veto power.
“The best way to eat an elephant is bit by bit,” Carpenter said.
Mark Pitsch is a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.
