Tony Evers’s veto shows the growing power of Midwestern Democrats
In an episode of “The Simpsons”, Lionel Hutz, a lawyer, takes a pen to a business card to wheedle out of a commitment. Instead of “no money down”, he inserts a comma and an exclamation mark to change the meaning: “No, money down!”. On July 5th Tony Evers, the white-haired Democratic governor of Wisconsin, took inspiration from Mr Hutz, when he used his veto pen to excise seven words, four numbers and a hyphen from the Republican-controlled state legislature’s proposed budget. In doing so, he changed a two-year increase of $325 in per-pupil school funding (and property taxes) into one that will instead last until 2425. This, Mr Evers’s office noted in a statement, would guarantee the uplift “effectively in perpetuity”.
The ability to exercise such a “line item” veto, transforming the meaning of a law by deleting individual words, is a quirk in Wisconsin law that gives unusual power to governors. Under the state’s constitution, a governor can choose to approve parts of a law, rather than merely rejecting or assenting to the entire thing. Mr Evers’s creative use of his pen is not new. Indeed until 1990, governors in the Badger State could delete not just whole words but individual letters, in effect to create entirely new laws. Yet in a state where the legislature is dominated by Republicans, it shows a level of assertiveness to get Democratic priorities into law. In that, it is typical of a newly emerging willingness across the Midwest by Democratic politicians to use the power they have as much as possible.
In Minnesota, the legislative session that ended in May was described by the state’s governor, Tim Walz, as the most successful “maybe in Minnesota history”. With a slim House majority and a majority of just one in the state Senate, the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party (DFL), the state’s Democratic affiliate, passed laws to strengthen abortion rights and gun…
2023-07-13 07:58:54
Post from www.economist.com
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