With veto, Walker turns budget plans on their head

MADISON - Gov. Scott Walker showed this week the vast power of his veto pen, using it to delete sections of the budget and in some cases to enact the opposite of what legislators wanted.

For example, the GOP governor struck the word “not” from one section of the 399-page budget in the hope of requiring an audit of the University of Wisconsin System.

Lawmakers included in the budget this phrase: “The Legislative Audit Bureau shall not conduct a financial audit of the (UW) system for the 2017-’18 and 2018-’19 fiscal years.” Walker deleted the word “not.”

The move was an illustration of the incredible authority that Wisconsin governors have long had, including the ability to turn a prohibition from lawmakers into a requirement.

In another case, Walker gave himself more power to move money around within the Department of Transportation’s accounts.

The Legislature meant to grant Walker something narrower, writing in the budget that “the Department of Transportation may submit a request to make transfers of state and federal moneys between the surface transportation program and state highway program to the Joint Committee on Finance.”

Walker cut out some of those words to write a new sentence that says, “The Department of Transportation may make transfers between the highway program.” That means he can reallocate money from one road project to another — without having to get sign-off from lawmakers.

Walker signed the budget Thursday after issuing 98 vetoes. It was supposed to be completed by July 1 but was 12 weeks late because the governor and Republicans who control the Legislature had trouble reaching agreements on transportation and taxes.

Voters gave Wisconsin’s governor partial veto powers in 1930 and the Wisconsin Supreme Court since then has repeatedly upheld the ability of governors to use those powers in creative ways.

Since the 1990s, voters have curbed those powers with constitutional amendments. One amendment ended the “Vanna White veto” that allowed governors to strike out the letters of words to create new words. Another amendment did away with the “Frankenstein veto” that allowed governors to cut up parts of two or more sentences to create new sentences.

But — as Walker showed — governors can still slice and dice budget language to create whole new meanings out of what lawmakers give them.

Fred Wade, a Madison attorney and longtime proponent of reining in the partial veto power in Wisconsin, said the governor shouldn’t be able to use his veto pen to create budget language that lawmakers didn’t intend.

“It’s totally antithetical to why we have a Legislature,” Wade said in the leadup to Walker’s budget vetoes.

In another section of the latest budget dealing with highway funds, Walker trimmed words from a sentence to broaden the types of transportation money it dealt with.

That section originally dealt with funds “for providing public access roads to navigable waters, for the purposes of (statutes) 84.27 and 84.28, and for improving transportation facilities, including facilities funded under applicable federal acts or programs, that are not state trunk or connecting highways.” He pruned it to read “for providing roads and highways.”

All the changes Walker made with his vetoes are expected to stand. Assembly Republicans said they would discuss next month whether to try to override some of Walker’s vetoes, but Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said there was “zero chance” his house would approve any veto overrides.

The last time a veto was overridden in Wisconsin was in 1985.