(The Center Square) – If Wisconsin Democrats want to avoid having kings, one Republican senator thinks they should be big proponents of a constitutional amendment to limit the power of a governor.
A joint resolution to limit Wisconsin’s governors from using their veto power to delete words, letters or characters from appropriations will be heard next Wednesday in the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development.
Senate Joint Resolution 11 would need to be approved in two separate legislative sessions before reaching the ballot statewide as early as 2017.
The proposed constitutional amendment comes after Gov. Tony Evers used the current veto power to erase numbers and a hyphen to change the year “2024-25” to “2425” in a school appropriation in the budget bill.
That meant a $325 per student per year funding increase for the next 400 years was allowed and later upheld in a 4-3 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
“For a guy who’s popular with the ‘No Kings’ crowd, Gov. Evers sure loves playing monarch,” Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, told The Center Square. “With one royal flick of his veto pen, he taxed homeowners for the next 400 years.
“This amendment restores the balance our founders intended: government of the people, not by decree.”
The constitutional amendment would limit the veto power to sections of an appropriations bill rather than allowing for words and numbers to be deleted individually.
The amendment was originally introduced in February in both the Senate and Assembly but is now seeing its first committee action in the Senate with the scheduled public hearing. A public hearing was held in the Assembly Committee on State Affairs in June.
Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, described the proposal as a “once and for all” measure to rein in the powers of a governor in the state and “restore balance.”
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He explained that the current veto power can allow a governor to write laws that the public never had a voice in creating and the Legislature didn’t have a say in allowing, calling the current veto power a “quirk that makes our state an outlier in America.”
Allen said that both Evers and former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, stretched the veto power beyond what he believes the public would approve, citing Walker ending a levy limit exemption for school energy efficient projects.
