3/12/2008 by Richard Thomas

On April 1 (April Fool’s Day—coincidence?) Wisconsin residents will vote on municipal, county and school board seats, the state Justice of the Supreme Court…and (cue the scary violin music) a referendum on a constitutional amendment to curb the “Frankenstein” veto.

This supposedly monstrous power enables the governor to take apart a bill passed by both the Senate and Assembly, re-word and stitch it back together as something completely different from the legislative intent.

Wisconsin governors have had this power since 1931, the same year the Boris Karloff film version was released. That is a coincidence. Back then it was simply called the line-item or partial veto. “Frankenstein” is a catchy marketing term coined in 2005 by those who want to abolish it.

In 2005, Gov. James Doyle, a Democrat, used the veto in a sleight-of-hand move to increase a transfer of money from the transportation fund from $268 million to $427 million. He used the additional money to restore K-12 education funding Republican majorities in both houses had cut.

Few argued that education was an unworthy cause. What people freaked out over is how the governor did it: narrowing 752 words down to 20, and taking digits from various numbers in the text (including years) to achieve the $427 million figure.

In the 2007-09 state budget, finally adopted in October, Doyle again used the line-item veto to raise local government and school levy limit increases from 2 percent to 3.86 percent.

The Senate — now controlled by Democrats — voted unanimously to place the veto question before voters in the April 1 referendum. The Assembly followed suit in January on a 94-1 vote. The very lonely “no” vote was our own Rep. Frank Boyle, D-Superior.

Marginalized as he is, Representative Boyle has a point. Vetoes are a game played by both legislators and the governor, and the referendum merely continues the illusion that our lawmakers are accomplishing something.

All 50 governors have veto powers, and 43 have line-time veto powers.

Wisconsin’s line-item veto did not achieve Frankenstein status until the tenure of Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, who used it 1,552 times. Such was his overuse that in 1990 Wisconsinites voted to end the “Vanna White” veto, the practice of deleting mere letters and combining parts of words. Yet Thompson got around it, setting a record during the very next year with 457 line-item vetoes.

Despite the 1990 setback, Thompson’s vetoes gained him popularity with voters. A federal line-item veto was a platform plank in his brief bid in the 2008 presidential campaign. The campaign ads of Mitt Romney, another Republican candidate until he also dropped out of the race, similarly bragged about his veto record as governor of Massachusetts.

There is no federal line-item veto. Congress gave President Clinton this power in 1996 but the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in 1998.

Unlike the U.S. government, states cannot deficit spend, so governors often use their vetoes to balance budgets. Governors love to wield it as a power trip. But legislators love to introduce all sorts of legislation (pork, anyone?) they know will be vetoed, just so they can say they tried. Then they cite these attempts when raising campaign money. Wisconsin’s 2007-09 budget came in four months overdue; during the stretched-out process lawmakers held 120 fundraisers.

They really don’t want to change the system, and this amendment won’t.

Even if it passes, the governor still will be able to change numbers (for instance, reduce $100,000 to $10,000), strike words within a sentence, and find many other ways to be creative. Some call for doing away with the line-item veto altogether, but that proposal has gained little ground. If lawmakers really wanted to make a difference they would define what the governor can do, rather than can’t, which is easily circumvented.

Frankenstein ban supporters say it will encourage the governor to work with legislators rather than against them. Lawmakers might try overcoming their own partisanship and work with each other. It takes a two-thirds majority to override vetoes, but Wisconsin hasn’t done it on a budget since 1985.

On Feb. 25, the Minnesota Legislature for the first time overrode two-term Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto, his 37th. Ironically, it was over transportation funding, the catalyst for Wisconsin’s April 1 referendum.

But passage really won’t hamstring Doyle or future Wisconsin governors.

And as the Minnesota Legislature just demonstrated, neither Pawlenty nor Doyle can outmaneuver a two-thirds legislative majority with a line-item veto pen.

Better yet that Wisconsin legislators get their act together before fooling with the constitution. We urge Badger state residents to reject the proposed amendment and send a message to their lawmakers: Go do something real.

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