Good evening. Thanks for joining us.
So every two years,
the state of Wisconsin has to
decide where to spend its money.
And this year it's putting
some toward cleaning up those
forever chemicals called Pthos.
It's expanding affordable housing
and it's funding public schools
for the great, great, great,
great grandkids of Wisconsin residents.
That last part,
the 400 years of funding was not in
the version the Wisconsin governor,
Tony Evers, got last week of the bill.
What he got?
Was an increase in the public school
budget of a couple $100 per pupil
in each year for the next two years.
But two years wasn't what Evers wanted to do,
so he took his red pen like a scalpel,
vetoing a couple of digits and a hyphen
to extend that funding for generations.
And chances are you have
questions like we did,
one of them being How is this possibly legal?
We wanted to know as well,
So Kent went to find
out. Yeah, Jen, I took those questions
to our resident Supreme Court and
political science expert Tim Johnson
with the University of Minnesota.
And it turns out this level of veto pen
editing wouldn't really be possible
anywhere outside of Wisconsin. With
a legislative trifecta in Minnesota,
Governor Walz certainly didn't
need a line item veto this year,
but it was still on the table here and
in these 44 states across the country.
But in almost all cases,
line item vetoes are what they sound like,
giving a governor limited power
to strike lines or sections
of bills they disagree with.
And then there is Wisconsin.
There is a line item veto plus in Wisconsin.
And you, even as a Wisconsin resident,
might not know that.
Wait, what did you call it?
A line item veto plus,
that is something I just made-up off the top.
I'm gonna say it sounds like
a streaming service, right?
But that's really.
Yeah, it doesn't like a streaming service.
But that's really what it is.
Not just cutting out line items
that a governor doesn't like,
but cutting out words and numbers to
the point where a governor has a lot of
power over what is written into law.
Governor Tony Evers exercised that
power 51 times before signing
the two year budget yesterday.
He did so by chopping 3 1/2 billion
in Republican income tax cuts all
the way down to 170. 25 million.
Yet that is far from the biggest change.
I have also used my broad veto
authority to provide school districts
with predictable longterm increases
for the foreseeable future. Beavers
locked in those increases by taking
his pen to a two year $325 increase
in per pupil funding that would have
expired after the 202425 school year,
and he did so by vetoing the 20 and the
hyphen to transform the end date to 2425.
Are there any limits to this in Wisconsin?
Because it seems like you can
change the whole meaning of.
Whatever's passed, you can 100% change
the entire meaning of what is passed.
But to do so, you have to be very creative.
You cannot strike out letters of
a particular word, so you have to
cut full words at any one time.
Wisconsin voters banned those socalled
Vanna white vetoes with a constitutional
amendment back in 2000 to prevent
a governor from using individual
letters to craft entirely new words.
So I am no elite legal mind.
That's why we're talking to you.
But he is striking out individual
digits to. Make a new number
so state law and again the
state Supreme Court affirmed
you can strike out numbers.
The other thing that can be
struck out is grammatical marks.
Wisconsin voters did also ban the
socalled Frankenstein veto back in
2008 after former Governor Jim Doyle
struck hundreds of words across
multiple paragraphs to create one
new sentence that steered hundreds
of millions of dollars away from the
transportation fund it was intended for.
So he made the law essentially say
the exact opposite of what the.
Glacier had passed.
This is going to go well beyond that.
If it really stands for 400 years,
do you imagine this one
might be going to court?
Probably not. I mean,
this is a power that's been
used for darn near 50 years,
back to the early 1970s by both parties.
Governors of both parties,
Tommy Thompson was famous for using this
additional part of the line item veto.
What's most likely just going
to stay exactly where it is and
education will be funded with these
increases for the next 400 years.
There you go. Wisconsin Republicans,
by the way, slammed the governor's
vetoes as expected yesterday,
saying he used his power to implement
his own liberal tax and spend agenda.
But Johnson says that's about as
far as they're likely to go because
they don't have the 2/3 majority
needed to override that veto.
Jana, I have a lot of questions.
Like, still, I I
mean, just basically,
why hasn't the Wisconsin
legislature fixed this?
This is ridiculous.
Well, again, it's kind of that political
gamesmanship that both parties have used.
And even in the Republican statement
yesterday they said he exercised
the supreme power of that veto pen.
They didn't say he can't or that
we're going to challenge it.
I think it's just something both sides
kind of understand at this point too.
It has to go to the voters and
change constitutional amendments
and you need to have super,
super majorities to kind of
make all this stuff stop.