Line item veto cuts both ways

“It’s good to be the king,” - Mel Brooks in “History of the World Part I” In an attention-grabbing move that highlights both the power and the potential abuse of the line item veto, Gov. Tony Evers last week signed a state budget which promised increases in school funding for the next 400 years and which gutted tax cuts for the highest tax brackets.

According to the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau, Wisconsin’s governor has had the line partial veto authority since a 1930 amendment to the state constitution gave the governor power “to strike words, numbers, and punctuation in both appropriation and non-appropriation text, thus giving the governor a role in the lawmaking process in a far more substantial way than simply having veto power over an entire bill. Armed with the partial veto, the governor can alter text and numbers to create laws that, not only may have been unintended by the legislature, but also that the legislature deliberately rejected. It is no wonder U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner described Wisconsin’s partial veto as ‘unusual, even quirky.’

Among the changes Evers made was to change a phrase that increased funding for the “2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year” to the “2023–2425” school years by vetoing parts of that sentence.

While it made for an attention-grabbing stunt, the practical long-term impacts of the legislative slight of hand will very likely not extend beyond this biennial budget and could bring a backlash during the next round of budget-writing in two years.

While Gov. Evers was playing cute with making line item veto cuts to draw attention to school funding needs, his other cuts to the $99 billion budget will have more lasting impacts and potentially negative consequences for the hope of future bipartisanship in the state government.

Republican leadership made tax cuts a major priority in the budget, promising relief to middle-class taxpayers. The budget, as approved by the legislature, would have done that, including a total of $3.5 billion in income tax cuts across all the tax brackets. Under that plan, those earning the state’s median household income of $67,000 per year income taxes would be cut by $250. Eleven of the state’s wealthiest residents, those who earn more than $75 million, would each see tax cuts of $1.8 million.

Despite the rhetoric saying otherwise, legislative leadership expected the reduction in tax rates to the highest brackets to be cut by Evers, but had banked on the tiers impacting middle-class taxpayers to remain. This would have given legislators a solid plank for campaigning in the next election cycle.

Evers had proposed his own tax cuts when he introduced his version of the state budget last winter, calling for tax credits rather than changing the tax rates. Since Evers was unable to get his way, he took the proverbial ball and went home with it. While all Wisconsinites will see some tax reduction this year, for the upper tiers of earners the reductions are far less than what was promised by the Republicans.

In fairness, Evers’ use of the partial veto power to alter budgets is nothing new. It has been used, and abused, by governors on both sides of the aisle and perhaps most egregiously by former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, under whom the partial veto became known as the “Frankenstein Veto” for his penchant for creating whole new legislation. In the current gotcha-last era of state government politics, stunts like those pulled by Gov. Tony Evers may have played well with his base, but could have long-term negative impacts on relations between the Governor’s office and the legislative leadership with Wisconsin residents caught in the crossfire.