Court backs gov's trick that transformed year of school funding into 400-years of spending

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers' creative 2023 line-item veto that transformed a one-year school funding increase into a year-on-year increase for the next 400 years.

Evers' veto came in 2023, with a bill that increased school funding by $325 per student for the "2024-25" school year. He creatively crossed out the digits "20" and the hyphen, along with a few other words in the sentence, to rewrite the bill as increasing funding per student by that amount every year through the "2425" school year.

A number of states give governors "line-item" veto power, which lets them approve a bill in part but cross out certain provisions they object to. But Wisconsin's constitution, adopted in 1930, is unique in that its line-item veto power is so broad it allows the governor to cross out individual words and phrases to change the meaning of the bill to something totally different from what legislators wrote.

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Historically, governors have used this power to great effect.

In 1973, Gov. Patrick Lucey vetoed the word "not" from the phrase "not less than 50 percent" in an appropriations bill, making it do the exact opposite of what lawmakers had written it to do.

To try to rein in this power, voters have approved referenda that set some limits on the line-item veto, including a prohibition on the governor vetoing individual letters within a word to change the word, or combining the first half of one sentence with the second half of another. Nonetheless, line-item vetos in Wisconsin have, at least in theory, still allowed governors to cross out words within one sentence, even if it changes the sentence's meaning.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was the focus of the first major statewide election since 2024, in which voters chose liberal-leaning lower-court Judge Susan Crawford over Judge Brad Schimel, the Trump-endorsed former GOP state attorney general backed heavily by millions in spending from tech billionaire Elon Musk, preserving the court's one-seat liberal majority.