WI Gov. Tony Evers Used This One Weird Trick To Increase School Funding For 400 Years
Experts caution inflation may wipe out the funding boost sometime in its first century.
The Wisconsin state supreme court on Friday held that Gov. Tony Evers acted legally when in 2023 he used a goofy quirk in the state’s veto law to extend an increase in school funding every year for the next 400 years. Wisconsin law allows governors to partially veto parts of bills, so Evers cleverly crossed out numerals in the effective date of the funding increase to make it last until 2425. Yes, we used basically the same “One Weird Trick” headline when Evers used the creative veto two years ago, and no we don’t wanna change it.
With the state supreme court’s decision, the state limit on how much revenue schools can raise will be increased by $325 per student every year for the next four centuries. Ain’t state government a hoot? Yeah, at some point that law could be repealed, but in the meantime, it means extra school funding, and that’s a terrific thing.
Here’s how Evers did it: He removed some words, a few numerals, and a hyphen in the bill so that the annual increase wouldn't last for just two school years, but instead through Anno Domini 2425. Like so:
The original $325 per student funding cap increase was already the largest school funding increase Wisconsin had ever allowed. Evers modestly said at the time, modestly enough, that his modifications to the bill would “provide school districts with predictable long-term increases for the foreseeable future.” Yes, and then some!
In her decision for the court’s 4-3 majority, Justice Jill Karofsky wrote,
We are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing. 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.
In an era where the federal government is insisting that a 1798 law on expelling citizens of countries the US is in a shooting war with can also be used to defy due process and disappear people to foreign torture prisons forever, we’re pretty happy to see a weird legal loophole being used to help people instead.
In a statement, Evers said he was not displeased with the ruling, saying “Hell yes.”
“This decision is great news for Wisconsin’s kids and our public schools, who deserve sustainable, dependable, and spendable state support and investment,” Evers, a former public school educator, said. “For over a decade, the Legislature has failed to meet that important obligation. Importantly, this decision does not mean our work is done — far from it.”
Needless to say, Republicans were very very unhappy with the decision, accusing Evers of bad nasty tricksiness and the state Supremes of rubber stamping it, shame on them. State Rep. Robin Vos (R), the speaker of the state Assembly, sputtered that the ruling was “a tortured reading of our Constitution that will hurt Wisconsin taxpayers for hundreds of years to come.” He also griped that the state supreme court was so terribly, terribly partisan.
Vos, we should add, is the same Republican ghoul who blocked every effort to make voting safer during the height of the COVID pandemic. After all, low turnout and in-person elections in April 2020 might have given an advantage to Dan Kelly, the GOP-backed candidate in that year’s supreme court elections. Kelly was a sure vote to uphold the state’s longstanding Republican gerrymander, and to approve wiping 200,000 voters from the rolls before the 2020 election.
Voters, mightily pissed off at all the GOP fuckery, instead elected Karofsky in 2020, and the next year elected Janet Protasiewicz to the court as well, giving it a liberal majority that finally, in 2023, tossed out the state’s gerrymandered district maps that guaranteed a GOP majority, YAY. Why yes, after that election, Robin Vos led a failed effort to impeach Protasiewicz because having liberals on the state supreme court is somehow illegal.
Earlier this month, voters said hell no to Elon Musk and the $20 million he poured into the campaign by overwhelmingly electing Susan Crawford to a vacant seat on the state SCOTUS. Despite Musk’s money, attempts to buy votes, and an endorsement from Mad King Donald, Crawford stomped MAGA candidate Brad Schimel in a 55 percent to 45 percent vote.
Just a few weeks later, Crawford and her liberal colleagues on the court have upheld Evers’s tricksy veto, bringing better education funding across the state, YAY. And if that also inspires a voter initiative to change the veto law, that’s probably a good thing, too, since the partial veto has previously been used — by governors of both parties — in some very nutty ways to significantly alter bills passed by the Lege. Here’s a brief review from the Washington Post (gift link):
In the 1980s, Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) struck letters out of words to create new words. The state Supreme Court signed off on such “Vanna White vetoes,” which got their name from the host who turned letters on “Wheel of Fortune.” In response, voters amended the state Constitution to ban such vetoes.
In 2005, Gov. Jim Doyle (D) shifted more than $400 million to schools by crossing all but 20 words out of a 752-word section of the budget, stitching together an entirely new sentence. That led to another amendment to the state Constitution, this time banning “Frankenstein vetoes” that pieced together parts of two or more sentences.
Hilariously, the only reason the earlier constitutional amendments didn’t already bar Evers from his 400-year veto was that they only prohibited striking out individual letters, but not numerals or punctuation.
As lovers of clean government, we would support an amendment to eliminate such creative trolling revisions. But as lovers of weird news and the occasional wackiness of state laws, we’d be a little sad to see them go away.
[Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel / NYT / WaPo (gift link)]
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