MADISON, Wis. (CN) — The conservative-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court jettisoned three of the Democratic governor’s budget vetoes on Friday, delivering a second blow to the governor’s executive authority in as many days.
The court’s meandering decision declared that three of four vetoes Governor Tony Evers enacted during negotiations over the Badger State’s 2019 biennial budget are unconstitutional, rebuking the chief executive for undermining legislative intent and forgoing decades of precedent that supported one of the most powerful veto pens in the nation.
Friday’s decision comes just a day after Wisconsin’s highest court upheld most of a spate of lame-duck laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in late 2018, which clipped the powers of the Democratic governor and attorney general and gave the legislature broad authority to oversee and intervene in executive functions.
Three taxpayers represented by conservative advocacy group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, sued the governor last summer over what they called unconstitutional partial vetoes to the 2019 budget. The suit took aim at four vetoes out of nearly 80 that Evers carried out during budget negotiations.
WILL, which has repeatedly sued Evers and members of his administration since he was elected in 2018, directly petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court on the grounds that Evers’ vetoes struck portions of the legislature’s budget to effectively create new laws never voted on by lawmakers – which has been a common, legally defensible practice for Badger State governors for almost 100 years.
The vetoes at issue created a grant program awarding taxpayer money for electric vehicle charging stations, eliminated conditions on how $75 million in transportation funds appropriated by the legislature can be divvied up, increased registration fees for drivers of heavy trucks, and set new regulations and imposed new taxes on vaping products.
While the court’s complex, nearly 150-page decision pertains only to the four challenged vetoes and does not necessarily change the partial veto powers of future Wisconsin governors, the decision affirms the latest in a series of targeted efforts from conservatives to rein in Evers’s executive powers – a campaign buttressed again and again by conservatives in the state’s most powerful judicial body.
No rationale in the court’s ruling had the support of all justices, but Friday’s disjointed decision laid out in four separate writings that the vetoes involving electric vehicle charging stations, conditions tied to transportation funds and vaping regulations were unconstitutional via 5-2, 5-2 and 4-3 majorities, respectively. The veto increasing heavy truck registration fees was found to be constitutional by a 5-2 bipartisan majority.
Justices’ explanations condemning or defending Evers’ varied, but the general thesis cosigned by the court’s five conservatives was that Evers’ crafty vetoing drastically changed the central idea that spurred the budget bill in the first place and rendered himself a one-man legislature under the guise of Wisconsin governors’ substantial veto powers.
Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, who aligned with the court’s conservatives on the electric vehicle charging station and transportation funds vetoes but defected with the court’s liberals on the vaping products veto, took particular issue with the first two in her 48-page writing.
For example, in order to arrive at funding for electric vehicle charging stations, Evers struck much of the language of a provision earmarking grant funds to school boards to replace current buses with energy efficient ones, leaving only language saying the grant funds would be used “for alternative fuels.”
“Governor Evers could not use his partial veto power to change the school bus modernization fund into an alternative fuel fund,” Roggensack wrote. “Nor could he use his partial veto to change the local road improvement fund into a fund for local grants or local supplements, devoid of any requirements that it be used for local roads.”