Business group challenges Evers' creative veto that extended school aid for 400 years

MADISON – Attorneys with Wisconsin's largest business lobby on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to strike down Gov. Tony Evers' use of his partial veto authority to increase funding for public schools for the next four centuries.

The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center is representing two Wisconsin taxpayers — Jeffery LeMieux and David DeValk — and timed the filing to coincide with Tax Day. The lawsuit was filed as an original action petition, which means attorneys are asking the state's highest court to bypass lower courts and take it up directly.

"The law is clear," WMC Litigation Center deputy director Nathan Kane said in a statement. "Voters and their elected legislators are the ones empowered to increase taxes, no one else."

Evers, a Democrat, used his partial veto authority in July to ensure school districts' state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425.

He crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a "20" from a reference to the 2024-25 school year, resulting in the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.

"Republicans and their allies will stop at nothing to take away resources from our kids and our public schools," Evers spokeswoman Britt Cudaback said in a statement. "Republicans' latest lawsuit aims to strip over $300 from every student at every public school in Wisconsin for the foreseeable future even as millions of Wisconsinites are being forced to raise their own property taxes to help our schools make ends meet. That's bad for our kids, that's bad for our schools, and it's wrong for Wisconsin."

Wisconsin gives its governors some of the most sweeping executive powers in the country, although partial veto authority has been scaled back over time.

The Republican-led state Senate voted last year to override the veto, which requires a two-thirds majority vote, but the Assembly — where the GOP majority falls short of two-thirds — did not take it up. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers reintroduced a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar governors from using a partial veto to increase any tax or fee.

"The governor overstepped his authority with this partial veto, at the expense of taxpayers, and we believe oversight by the Court is necessary," WMC Litigation Center executive director Scott Rosenow said in a statement.

At one time, Wisconsin governors could veto individual letters to create new words — known as the Vanna White veto — or strike words from two or more sentences to make new sentences, known as the Frankenstein veto. Voters eliminated governors' ability to make such changes in 1990 and 2008, respectively.

Until Evers' budget action in July, governors had used vetoes to increase state spending above levels set by lawmakers 31 times since 1991 and increased bonding levels seven times during that time, according to a 2020 analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

Governors' veto powers were again reduced in a 2020 state Supreme Court ruling that threw out three changes Evers had made to the 2019-21 state budget but upheld a fourth.

The decision was fractured, with different groups of justices reaching different conclusions about when to throw out vetoes. There was no majority agreement defining how future vetoes should be reviewed.

The WMC lawsuit asks the court, which currently has a liberal majority, to strike down Evers' veto and declare that the state Constitution "forbids the governor from striking individual digits in an enrolled bill to create a new year" and "does not authorize the governor to strike language in an enrolled bill to create a larger duration than the one approved by the legislature."

Jessie Opoien can be reached at jessie.opoien@jrn.com.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: WMC challenges Evers partial veto that extended school aid 400 years