Wisconsin Supreme Court calls for responses to WMC petition challenging veto powers

MADISON — The state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered parties named in a case challenging Wisconsin governors' partial veto powers to file responses by April 30, signaling the court may consider the challenge filed by the state's largest business lobby.

The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center filed the lawsuit on Monday on behalf of two Wisconsin taxpayers — Jeffery LeMieux and David DeValk — as an original action petition, which means attorneys are asking the high court to bypass lower courts and take it up directly.

The WMC lawsuit asks the court, which currently has a liberal majority, to strike down one of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' partial vetoes from the most recent state budget, and to 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."

Evers 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.

"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."

No justices dissented to Tuesday's order.

"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 in response to the lawsuit. "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.

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.

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

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Supreme Court calls for responses to WMC veto powers suit