While Wisconsin's Governor still has the strongest veto pen in the nation, voters recently restricted it, by banning the so-called Frankenstein Veto. The veto power received its name from the governors ability create new legislation by stitching together unrelated sections of bills, by vetoing out individual sentences and individual words in the middle.
The governor is still able to manipulate words within a single sentence, however, and was able to dramatically alter the meaning of a recent budget bill by chopping up several long sentences full of redundant numbers.
The Wisconsin lawmakers who wrote the budget bill were either stupid to include those long-winded sentences or they were in co-hoots with the governor. But while it pains me to say this, I'm not sure the lawmakers were stupid.
Most the of the governors vetoes actually made the budget bill better, making deeper cuts to spending that lawmakers knew were necessary but unpopular.
It looks like the lawmakers enabled the veto, because there were too scared to make the cuts that needed to be made.
What the governor did was mostly in the best interest of the state, but it definitely violated the spirit of the reform that voters wanted earlier this year.
If lawmakers don't start writing some veto-proof bills, it might be time to restrict the governor's veto powers even further.
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