The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget.
“For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,” the sentence read when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, “add $325” to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student.
But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.”
It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal?
On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented.
“We uphold the 2023 partial vetoes, and in doing so we are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” Justice Jill J. Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion. “However, our Constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”
Wisconsin has a long, bipartisan history of inventive vetoing that has led to intermittent outrage from whichever party does not hold the governorship. Though many states give their governor the right to veto parts of bills, Wisconsin governors have long wielded a distinctly expansive veto authority in which they can cross out words or numbers, sometimes changing the meaning of a bill. That authority has been reined in over the decades, but not eliminated.
After Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, deployed the so-called “Vanna White veto” to nix individual letters in the 1980s, voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution to say a governor could not make new words in an appropriation bill by simply erasing letters.
But that amendment did not explicitly ban crossing out individual numbers, an opening (or, some say, a loophole) that Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, used to change “December 31, 2018” to “December 3018” in a law involving school districts and energy efficiency projects.
That episode, which became known in Madison as the “Thousand-Year Veto,” was also challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In that case, the court found that the lawsuit had not been brought in a timely manner and allowed the veto to stand.
In the case decided on Friday, the court’s conservative justices described a “fantastical state of affairs” in which a governor “takes the collection of letters, numbers and punctuation marks he receives from the Legislature, crosses out whatever he pleases, and — presto! — out comes a new law never considered or passed by the Legislature at all.”
“One might scoff at the silliness of it all, but this is no laughing matter,” Justice Brian Hagedorn added in that dissent. “The decision today cannot be justified under any reasonable reading of the Wisconsin Constitution.”
Mr. Evers’s four-century veto was challenged by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a business group, on behalf of two Wisconsin residents who argued that the governor had exceeded his constitutional authority when he nixed numbers to extend the school funding limit. In oral arguments last year, Scott Rosenow, a lawyer for those residents, told the justices that “this 400-year veto approaches the absurd, and this partial veto power is corrosive to democracy.”
But lawyers for Mr. Evers insisted that the veto, even if unusual, was well within his authority under Wisconsin law. Numbers, they argued, were not letters, and thus could be deleted individually under the Wisconsin Constitution.
“I can understand the initial skepticism that one may have upon seeing the veto that was exercised here,” Colin Roth, an assistant attorney general, told the justices when he presented Mr. Evers’s case. But he argued that “the governor here very reasonably relied on the case law.”
“Perhaps if this law had been drafted differently,” Mr. Roth said, “the governor could not have achieved this result, so the Legislature has tools when drafting.”
The case put the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the middle of another battle over partisanship and power in the closely divided state. The court, which flipped from conservative to liberal control in 2023, has heard pivotal cases in recent years over election results, redistricting and abortion.
Earlier this month, a liberal judge, Susan Crawford, was elected to the court over a conservative jurist supported by President Trump and Elon Musk. Her victory preserved a narrow liberal majority on the court just months after Mr. Trump carried Wisconsin. The election was the most expensive judicial race in American history.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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