Frankenstein Veto
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"Neither the framers of the 1930 amendment, nor the voters who ratified it, had any intention of creating a unilateral executive power to create laws that the legislature did not approve. Instead, they sought to ensure that each separate item that might become law as part of an appropriation bill would have the approval of the governor, in addition to that of the senate and the assembly. [2]"
And guess what? The Frankenstein veto doesn't exist anymore! It was removed in 2008 [3]. The Wikipedia article should more explicitly state that.
Note that line-item vetoing still exists widely across the US and is quite useful.
From an absurdist standpoint, I find the Frankenstein veto hilarious because it's, to use the term from the Wikipedia article, "quasi-legislating." You're not actually adding content to the bill, but you're changing the meaning! It's twisted and brilliant at the same time.
One commenter says "how can this possibly be legal?" Well, it's not anymore! But it did make for some clever and humorous legislating. Like, look at link [1] and find the picture half-way down with yellow highlights. You have to have a certain audacity to do that.
Also, I'm from Wisconsin and would love to see Jim Doyle fight the Bears at Lambeau. He probably would have wiped the floor with Cutler...
Sources:
[1] https://wiscontext.org/story-wisconsins-singular-partial-vet...
[2] https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Page...
> An amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution passed in 2008 sought to curb the practice even further, but its prohibition on "crossing out words and numbers to create a new sentence from two or more sentences" left intact the Governor's power to "cross out words within a sentence to change its meaning, remove individual digits to create new numbers or delete entire sentences from paragraphs." This loophole has allowed the practice to continue, albeit less frequently.
Eh, alter a particular sentence seem like a big issue. power to the governor by the words on the page. money you're just sloppy.
^^ All of that are changing individual sentences of yours, read it now.
I'm sure Tony Evers appreciates your support for making him the judge in all criminal cases and allowing him to issue currency. (I'm sure he also agrees that only a bad sentence could be edited to imply an absurd non sequitur.)
>changing words to alter a particular sentence lets the governor legislat[e].
Almost every other country on earth seems to get on fine without it.
It seems like a bizarre and trivially abusable power to me. Say a left-wing legislature passes a bill to make taxation more progressive, by decreasing the standard rate of tax, and adding an additional rate of tax for people earning over a million dollars a year. A right-wing governor can just line-item veto the second part, and turn it into a tax cut. So either the legislature simply won't pass such a bill, effectively silencing the voice of the people as expressed through their votes for legislators, or they will have to draft it in a cunning way to make it line-item-veto-proof, spending time and text, and reducing clarity, to overcome that obstacle.
The "checks and balances" of our government are really several different forms of government. We have the democracy of the public, the plebeian officers of the house, the aristocracy of the senate, the council of philosophers on the court, and the dictatorship of the executive.
None of this, however, argues in favor of giving the executive the authority to rewrite legislation. Even the much more mild line-item veto is an absurd workaround for a broken legislative process. If the legislature wants smaller, separable acts, it doesn't need to go crying to King Solomon.
That's most effective when you can lump those votes into one, rather than two bills voted serially. That happens sometimes anyway, but some bills (especially budgets) contain thousands if items each of which is only of interest to a minority. That happens even without bad faith or earmarking. A bill to build a road between two states is most favored by those two states; a weapons system makes jobs where it's made, and the runner-up gets nothing. That's the ordinary give-and-take of trying to run a large country.
A line-item veto upsets the ability to do that... which seems appropriate when it runs off the rails, but also prevents legitimate business. I don't have a good solution to that problem, and I'd be very happy if King Solomon were to propose one. Running a country of hundreds of millions of people with diverse, and often competing, interests is hard even under the best of circumstances. And today, I believe, the circumstances are not best.
Not being a fan of progressive taxation, I don't see your example as a bad outcome. If they want to raise taxes on some, pass it without the misdirection/"sweeteners" provided by tax cuts for others. That's not to say I'm a supporter of line-item veto overall. Though note that like all vetoes it can be overridden with a larger majority. So you're always only criticizing it on the basis of a slim majority not getting their way.
This just means that the legislature either won't pass the bill, or will pass a convoluted version that can't be line-item vetoed.
>So you're always only criticizing it on the basis of a slim majority not getting their way.
Presume that there is an election. Party A takes control of the governorship with 50.1% of the vote. Party B wins 65% of the seats in the legislature. The executive has the power to line-item veto any bill, and Party B cannot overrule the veto (presuming 2/3 majority is required), despite the slim majority Party A won the governorship by.
The implication being that the will of 65% of the electorate's is stymied by a weaker 50.1% of the electorate? You can't actually conclude that since roughly 15 percent appear to have voted both ways, making their will in this conflict ambiguous. Perhaps they support the gov they voted for so there's actually only a minority of the public who agrees with the legislature and their law. I say "roughly" because gimmicks such as gerrymandering, but these would not affect the governor vote.
So called sweeteners are often necessary to create good policy. Often a policy will be overall good for a population but slightly bad for a large group of people (e.g. free trade). There needs to be a way to compensate those negatively affected (e.g. through reeducation programs). If a governor can selectively pass free trade but leave out the part of the deal that made it palatable, they completely change the law and screw over tons of people.
Oh, and progressive taxation is a great way to eat the rich. Fuck the state and fuck capital, we will destroy anything that stands in the way of democracy.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Wikipedia is publically editable :)
What would happen to that engineer and code review process in a well-run tech organization?
And why should we not apply the same principles to legal changes -- which affect our real world environment -- as we do for software changes which affect our application environments?
Legal systems operate in constantly evolving environments and in thick, untransparent cases where the truth of the matter is typically unknown and needs are conflicting.
You might be able to do this kind of thing in limited settings of organizational design or corporate policy – but you will not be able to completely replace federal law with software.
Writing precise language is hard, but ambiguity of language is worse, since it can lead to potentially unsafe interpretation.
The Frankenstein Veto makes it possible for state Governors to alter the meaning 'near runtime' - certainly post-review - and accidentally or intentionally create loopholes which enable damaging outcomes.
Furthermore any software system that could handle the Frankensetin Veto would have to be extremely competent in natural language and somehow do model checking on all the combinations of cases that natural language can cover. Not going to happen in polynomial time buddy. Not for all sorts of law anyway.
The problem that the Frankenstein Veto case demonstrates doesn't necessarily have to be handled in software either. It's a problem with the workflow of law, not the systems implementation.
Beyond that, what I'm suggesting is that it could be helpful to gradually make it easier for the public to view, comment on, and search proposed and historic legislative changes.
Collaboration, tracking down bugs and coaching/mentoring in open source software is greatly aided by tools like GitHub; it's worth having concerns about whether such a service itself should be proprietary, but I do think the value it creates is worth looking at.
If something similar could be created for legal texts, I think it's possible that there could be similar benefits. There may be risks, too.
My suggestion isn't that we should devise a software system to implement the rules of the Frankenstein Veto; instead my theory is that the time-to-detect and time-to-recover from a process problem like the Frankenstein Veto would both be shorter in the presence of an open, collaborative, transparent legislative repository.
A parliamentary/ legal system cannot have a motion saying A and have the executive turn around exactly do B
https://archive.org/stream/THEMYTHOFTHERULEOFLAWByJohnHasnas...
It is the nature of law to be a negotiation among parties, with all of the properties of negotation that this implies – personal interests, wavering agreement. Believing that law can carry an objective authority disguises this reality and leaving the nature of law unacknowledged makes regulation of that system more difficult.
You might argue that making law more formal or explicit can help here, but laws are already very formal and explicit, and being formal and explicit doesn't guarantee total consistency, maybe paraconsistency at best unless you're dealing with logics much less rich than those we can embed in natural language.
(There usually are layers of responsibility above both; the board for a CEO and the people for a governor)
If you look at it in those terms, I think it's more likely that they mean that voters would be well served by setting aside other interests and reforming the legislative process further (the article discusses various reforms) so that the governor is not able to take actions that are effectively unilateral, and also by not re-electing (or perhaps in the extreme, recalling) the governor.
No, a CEO is a dictator. In the US, the state governor is a significantly different role from a dictator.
(CEOs that own majority stakes in their companies get close to complete control, but that's not what you are arguing, that control flows from the ownership, not the executive position).
Not always, but usually.
As a software developer with a political science degree and some legal education, you basically shouldn't do this.
> this is akin to discovering that an engineer
Legislators and executives are even less like engineers in intended function than legal text is like software code.
Legislative text isn't software code.b ,
(1) Legal text is often (arguably, most often in the US system) intended to be reified in application and/or in subordinate enactments (e.g., regulation); not only is it not executable code, it's often not intended as a complete specification.
(2) executive and legislative authorities (at least, in the US system) are not like members of a single team, but by-design adversarial power centers. (They are more like customers with conflicting demands than engineers on a team.)
In Poland, bills that amend laws are formed in a rigid way. They consist of a long list of recitals like:
"article such-and-such is amended to 'new text goes here'"
or
"after article 1.2.3, article 1.2.3a is hereby inserted with the following content: 'text goes here'"
(random example: http://prawo.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU2019000180...).
It has occurred to me that this kind of bills should be automatically parsable and convertible to a diff. Hence, a collection of amended acts should, in principle, be convertible to a Git repository.
The existing systems that cost heavy money probably already support something like this. But it still would be awesome to be able to do `git bisect` or `git log -S` on such a repo.
Our student organisation (for CS students) also has our organisation statutes in git: https://github.com/abakus-ntnu/statutter
In that way the line item veto is anathema to that. The legislature agreed to this bill allowing the governor to just cherry pick the parts they like breaks that down.
I assume that every state mandates the separation of the legislature and the executive and this goes fundamentally against that principle. So the courts, the third branch here, have to be willing to overlook this problem. So these actions become formally legal through the general corruption of two of the three branches of government? How is this possible? Basically, enough people fine common interest in allowing what would normally be illegal actions.
Do some branches of government act illegally, immorally and self servingly? It is not entirely uncommon. All it takes is a self-serving coterie of people at the top. It goes away from embarrassment and/or some part of the cabal dropping out.
(I am not a constitutional lawyer)
I think Frankenstein Vetos demonstrates that that thinking is folly, but that's how the reasoning goes. And at least in the case of firings, we've recognized that, just because you can fire a person for no reason, doesn't mean that there can't be reason that would be illegal to fire them.
Well through a law allowing it, I'd imagine.
Also, they probably assumed people would be reasonable and would use it responsibly.
The best argument I can muster is that it can be utilized to fight this.
Edit: alternatively, just don't allow bills that do more than one thing.
Some would argue that it would slow down the legislative process. But looking at the sheer size of the US Code, I would argue that it's not at all a bad thing.
I'm afraid you'd probably need a constitutional amendment for that. And it might not be easier than the "getting money out of politics" one (https://wolf-pac.com/the_solution/).
As for your link, I can't even figure out what their proposed text is.
In fact, they tend to accuse California of being worse than the federal government, but also at the specific things that they attribute to the lack of a single subject rule.
We do have a sort-of example to follow in the Byrd rule, which limits what can be done/attached to reconciliation bills specifically.
Both major parties in the US benefit from maintaining the status quo. Neither one wants to do anything that takes power away from Congress and puts it back in the hands of the people.
Whichever party is in power during any given cycle is the one that benefits from gerrymandering, omnibus bills, fillibusters, etc. So why would they change something that's useful for them?
Then when the pendulum swings to the other side of the aisle, the situation still holds true. Party A and Party B will fight each other to the death, but neither one wants a Party C to rise to prominence.
"I think I'll veto the 'not' here."
I don't know who thought this was a good idea.
"The following bill shall only be valid if it contains exactly 1,672 (one thousand, six hundred, and seventy-two) words."
... and still not the topmost one!
I think it's based in a difference of legal philosophy, English law has always considered "exactly what is written down and nothing more" where some other systems tend to give weight to what is considered reasonable (with the ambiguity problems that comes with it) and the intent of the contract.
This isn't really a good description; English civil law leans on reasonableness a lot, and administrative law has "Wednesbury unreasonableness". And US constitutional law discussion goes on about the "intent of the founders" a lot.
No, the Frankenstein veto is a consequence of having a highly partisan system and multiple layers of government. So you can get situations where the govenor and the legislature are engaging in this kind of stupid warfare. I don't think that's actually possible in Germany? Possibly the powers and subsidiarity are distributed in more clearly defined ways in the (partly US-written!) federal constitution?
This power is almost irrelevant to the issues concerning the current "duopoly" right now.
Remember how no-one, not even the republican party, wanted Donald Trump to win, but somehow he did?