Posted on 04/19/2025 3:08:03 PM PDT by Brilliant
The latest 4-3 doozy from the Wisconsin Supreme Court is hard to believe. The Legislature passed a budget to annually increase the limit on how much tax revenue school districts may raise, by $325 per pupil, “for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year.” Gov. Tony Evers abused his “partial veto” power, deleting words and an individual hyphen, making that text say “for 2023-2425.”
Meaning . . . an annual tax increase authorized for the next 402 years? Sure, why not, Justice Jill Karofsky writes for the liberal majority. The state constitution says the Governor may approve appropriation bills “in whole or in part,” but he “may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters.” The point of this limitation is to prevent vetoes from being used to write an entirely new law, like a ransom note glued together from magazine clippings.
Well, numbers aren’t letters, Justice Karofsky says: “The plain language of the constitutional text permits striking numbers written out with digits.” Knowing how bonkers this sounds, the majority ends its opinion with suggestions for how the Legislature could respond. One is to amend the constitution.
Another is to “anticipate the governor’s use of her or his power when crafting appropriation bills.” Hilarious: Maybe future budgets will have to be written without numerals, so that they speak of “three-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars until the fiscal year two-thousand-and-twenty-five.” That will sure be convenient for everyone involved.
Mr. Evers isn’t the first Governor to push the veto envelope, as the dissent notes. Yet the result, Justice Brian Hagedorn writes, is that the judiciary “treats bills presented to the governor as simply a set of alphanumeric ingredients from which the governor can cook up whatever he pleases…”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Looks like the reps have a job to do.
"...will not fund..."
"...will not allow..."
"...will not approve..."
It’s also called “scrivener’s error”. The judge is a fool.
Stolen Elections come with a high cost and bring dire consequences.
Coach potatoes getting what they deserve.
The judge is a fool.
No the Judge is a leftist activist. These awful people are not fools, it’s something much worse
This has been going in Wisconsin for a very long time. I was hoping we could have had that fixed when Walker was Governor, but that didn’t happen.
The progressives may like it now but if there is a GOP Governor we will see how much they like it then.
If a conservative governor did the exact same thing, the leftist judges would rule against her.
So is this because of the new idiot the voters of Wisconsin just put on the Supreme Court earlier this month?
If a conservative governor did the exact same thing, the leftist judges would rule against her.
My guess is that the next GOP Governor will make them wish they’d not done it.
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