The Partial Veto: What Is It and Why Was the Wisconsin Governor Able To Do That?

Wisconsin Governor Evers (D) made headlines last week after he used Wisconsin’s unique partial veto to extend a school funding provision in the state budget by 400 years. Evers took a line from the budget bill that would have extended a school funding program for the “2023-24” and “2024-25” school years and simply crossed out the “20” and the hyphen to create a year “2425” end date. This might sound too outrageous to stand, but it's not even the most extreme instance of Wisconsin's magic veto pen.

Partial Veto Authority

All 50 states grant their governors the ability to veto bills passed by the legislature. Many state constitutions go even further by allowing governors to veto only specific portions of legislative language without vetoing the entire bill itself. This is called the “partial veto.” Theoretically, the power to appropriate money lies with the legislative branch. However, governors in the 44 states that grant partial veto authority can remove specific appropriations from budget bills, meaning the power to control spending is more practically shared with the executive branch in these states. 

Note that while most states grant the chief executive a partial veto, the U.S. President does not have partial veto authority. The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 briefly granted the president partial veto power, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the partial veto unconstitutional on the federal level in 1998. 

Wisconsin Governor’s Veto Power: An Outlier Compared to Other States

But back to Wisconsin, which stands out among the 44 partial veto states. In the 19th century, appropriations in Wisconsin were proposed individually by the legislature, passed one by one, and presented to the governor, who could sign or veto each appropriation. But that practice shifted in the 20th century when lawmakers in the Badger State began bundling the appropriations bills together into large budget bills, which tied the governor’s hands. The chief executive could either approve the omnibus bill in its entirety — even if there were specific appropriations they objected to — or else veto the entire thing and start from scratch. To make matters worse, these omnibus bills began to arrive at the governor’s desk at the very last minute, giving the executive branch little choice but to sign the package. Sound familiar? 

The voters were disturbed by this change in budgetary practices and responded by amending the state constitution in 1930, allowing appropriation bills to be “approved in whole or in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law.” The governor began to exercise the new partial veto powers the very next year. But the creativity exercised by the executive branch grew over time along with the length of the budget bills. By the 1980s, governors had used the partial veto to turn the state's budget process into absurd exercises in blackout poetry, deleting large sections of legislative language but leaving in parts of words and numbers to create brand new policy. For example, Governor Tommy Thompson (R), the state’s longest-serving governor, transformed a property tax credit into a school tax credit in 1987. These bills began to resemble highly redacted FOIA requests.

Challenging the Bounds of Constitutional Amendments

Voters responded to these “Frankenstein vetoes” by amending the state constitution in 1990 to prohibit governors from creating new words by deleting individual letters and again in 2008 to prevent governors from creating new sentences by combining parts of two or more sentences. But these amendments have not stopped governors in Wisconsin from manipulating budget bill language.

In 2017, Governor Scott Walker (R) created a “thousand-year veto” by extending a state program deadline from 2018 to 3019. Similarly, by deleting only individual numbers and a hyphen, Governor Evers’ maneuver remains within the letter of the law granted by the partial veto provisions of the state constitution, but the courts will need to decide if this veto is within the spirit of the law in light of recent constitutional amendments. 

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