The court’s liberal majority is expected to rubber-stamp Tony Evers’ tax-and-spend agenda by upholding a challenge to the Governor’s partial veto.
The state entered 2025 with a $4.6 billion budget surplus, money that legislative Republicans want to return to Wisconsinites with a tax relief provision in their 2025-27 budget proposal. Budget season, when the legislature negotiates the next biannual budget, starts this month. The legislature must balance the budget, according to the state constitution.
There’s just one problem in their way: Evers’ creative veto pen.
Since 1930, Wisconsin is the only state where governors can partially veto spending bills—also called a “Frankenstein veto”—by selectively deleting words, numbers, and even punctuation from proposed legislation, effectively rewriting a bill without the legislature’s approval.
Evers used this power during the last budget battle to extend the expiration of an annual $325 school revenue limit increase by 400 years—from 2025 to 2425, slashing two digits and a dash to completely transform the bill’s scope. That’s four centuries of funding increases that can’t be undone without legislative or court action.
The partial veto is far more expansive and constitutionally dangerous than other states’ line-item veto, which is why voters approved a 1990 amendment blocking governors from “creat[ing] a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill.”
When that proved insufficient, the Wisconsin Supreme Court tried to rein it in to safeguard the state constitution’s separation of powers—with the conservative-controlled court declaring three of Evers’ edits unconstitutional in 2020 (Bartlett v. Evers). Then liberals—aided by a tidal wave of out-of-state dark money—elected Janet Protasiewicz, flipping the court majority to the Left and opening the gates for Democrat-friendly rulings.
Source: Restoration News