Democrats Embrace Government by Word Puzzle

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, July 20, 2023

 

Name any political phenomenon that benefits the Right, and Democrats will denounce it as “antidemocratic.”

 

Famously, liberals have derided new laws tightening voting requirements in the post-Covid world as a threat to democracy (even though in Georgia, for example, voting surged after the enactment of such laws). Gerrymandering, a practice older than American democracy itself, is often flagellated as a “thorn in the side of democracy.” Some even argued that the Supreme Court case that ended the judiciary’s nearly half-century-long stranglehold on abortion law and restored the issue to the democratic process would “degrade democracy.”

 

But when an actual act of erosion of the democratic process occurs and, say, locks in higher government-spending levels for the next four centuries, Democrats stick their arms out and feign blindness, as if the prescription for their glasses has just expired.

 

To be specific, while issuing his vetoes of the 2023–25 state budget, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, effectively played a word game and created a new law that had neither been contemplated nor voted upon by the Republican-controlled legislature.

 

A sentence in the budget bill passed by the legislature meant to temporarily increase per-pupil aid read, “For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325.”

 

But with the creative use of his editing pen, Evers struck the occasional word, hyphen, and number to transform the sentence into:

 

“For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325 . . .”

 

And thus, as if completing a morning Wordle puzzle, Evers locked in an enhanced level of school spending for the next 400 years. According to the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty, Evers’s word game will require $57 billion in additional property taxes over the next two decades to fund the promise he made.

 

If you are looking for a Schoolhouse Rock video to explain how a governor can unilaterally create entirely new laws out of thin air by wordplay, you will be left wanting. The poor bill sitting on Capitol Hill is left to gaze longingly at the laws born directly in the executive mansion, which exist solely because of the happy accident that the numbers “2,” “4,” “2,” and “5” appeared in order.

 

“Armed with the partial veto,” a memo by a state legislative attorney states, “the governor can alter text and numbers to create laws that not only may have been unintended by the legislature, but also that the legislature deliberately rejected.” U.S. Seventh Circuit Court judge Richard Posner has described this power as “unusual, even quirky.”

 

Yes, adorable.

 

Of course, governors of both political parties have used this creative “partial veto” authority to their own ends, and, twice before, voters responded by voting for a constitutional amendment to rein this power in. Wisconsin governors used to have what was called the “Vanna White” veto, which allowed them to take a full passage of text and strike letters from it to form new words.

 

For instance, in 1983, Republican governor Tony Earl grabbed 121 words of text and started axing individual letters until only 22 words remained. The new law changed how statewide waste disposal was managed.

 

After Governor Tommy Thompson continued to use the “Vanna White” veto, voters responded by passing a constitutional amendment outlawing it. But the partial veto was nowhere near dead, as the amendment still allowed governors to use whole words, if not individual letters, as building blocks. Soon, Democratic governor Jim Doyle used what power remained to stitch together 20 words of a 752-word passage, transferring $427 million out of the state road fund and into the state general fund, where it was ultimately transferred into the state school-funding formula.

 

Wisconsin voters once again stepped in and passed a constitutional amendment to ban what an enterprising young legislative staffer* dubbed the “Frankenstein veto”: the ability to stitch together words from unrelated sentences to create an entirely new sentence. But the law still allowed governors to delete individual words within sentences and remove sentences altogether.

 

Doyle was succeeded by Republican Scott Walker, who, buttressed by a like-minded GOP legislature, didn’t need to drastically reconstruct budget bills to get what he wanted. (He did use the partial veto on occasion, such as when he delayed the implementation of a program from 2018 to 2078.) But Evers won in 2018 and again in 2022, and rather than seriously consider the merits of Republican bills, he just decided to rewrite them to say what he wanted.

 

Of course, we barely need to imagine what the media reaction would have been if, say, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin had taken a 1,000-word passage out of a budget bill and creatively cropped it to start a new right-wing state university free from diversity counselors and gender-studies majors. Some poor MSNBC intern would have to stand behind Nicolle Wallace and supply her with smelling salts to make sure she didn’t pass out from disbelief.

 

Nevertheless, it will be Republicans that are constantly accused of trying to erode democracy through democratic means. (It would help the GOP’s argument if so many of its members didn’t continue to stand by a former president that tried to overturn the results of a national election.)

 

Take for example a recent piece in the Atlantic sporting a title that asks, “Is Tennessee a Democracy?” The evidence the piece uses to prove that the democratic process in Tennessee is on its last legs is that a lot of Republicans got elected to a lot of offices and immediately began doing Republican stuff — some of it is pretty kooky and misguided, but almost all of it has passed via the traditional democratic process. North Korea it ain’t.

 

When America’s founders weighed the merits of the separation of powers, they couldn’t possibly have envisioned an executive that unilaterally enacts laws by being particularly skilled at word and number games. And yet this legal hack allows Wisconsin governors to do just that.

 

Nevertheless, the reporters proclaiming the end of democracy will continue to flood Florida and Tennessee and all the states where they think the legislatures convene in meth labs. But they will continue to ignore Wisconsin Democrats’ embrace of the absurd partial veto, a practice that is a bit like cosmetic surgery — you can take out and put in as much as you want, but the product is probably going to be even less appealing.

 

* Yeah, that was me.