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Comment by guntars | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t know governors could make changes to the law before signing it. Because they can’t. What they CAN do is threaten to veto it and ask the legislators to change it and vote again on it. I kind of wish they had stuck with it and made her go on the record why she’s vetoing it, but of course they have to play nice to get anything done. Ultimately, not enough important people cared about it so it was DOA.

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Governors often have a line-item veto [0]. They can strike text out of a bill during signing, including in ways that change the meaning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto

It's maybe the dumbest possible idea, no sensible government should allow it.

I agree. This is problematic in so many ways. So essentially 43 states (according to wikipedia article shared) have no fruitful division of political powers. If executive power has legislation power, how that can go wrong I wonder -- looks at history book...

a line item veto makes sense in the case (as the name implies) of line items of a budget bill, deleting budgetary line items. It was initially intended to fight pork barrel politics.

The New York governor is a very powerful executive because the governor can tightly control the budget process and introduce budget legislation. In the 90s there was an infamous stalemate situation where the republican senate and democratic assembly would block budget bills for months. Subsequent court cases put control of the process in the governors hands.

The advocates for this bill pushed it in the wrong year. With political circumstances of 2022, it unfortunately got neutered by the many interests against it.

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