Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

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> Isn't it Wisconsin law that lets the Governor change any numeric digits in a law while it's on his or her desk?

Pretty close.

> (b) If the governor approves and signs the bill, the bill shall become law. Appropriation bills may be approved in whole or in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law.

> (c) In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill, and may not create a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/constitution/wi_unannotated

The big limitation here is that it is limited to appropriations. Further, the constitution goes out of its way to try and prevent creative vetoing.

Unfortunately, the court decided that numbers are not words.

As a result, the governor changed "for the 2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year" to "for 2023–2425"

https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/wisco...

May not reject individual letters? You know that's there because someone did it before.

> Evers’s veto is part of a dubious Wisconsin tradition. In 1975, Gov. Patrick Lucey struck the word “not” from the phrase “not less than,” reversing its meaning. In the 1980s, Govs. Tony Earl and Tommy Thompson crossed out individual letters to create entirely new words. And in 2005, Gov. Jim Doyle reappropriated over $400 million from its intended use by striking all but 20 words from a 752-word passage, creating a new sentence bearing no resemblance to the language approved by the legislature.

Wow, I have no words. I could strike some off your comment to make something, though.

Random trivia: Memes in that format are known as "speed of lobsters" memes, where you take a screenshot of some text/post/tweet/whatever and then delete/hide words and letters to make up completely different sentences.

Well, I thought I knew all the memes, but I learned something new, thank you.

I'm not in the US so I've no dog in this race only curiousity.

I can understand allowing a governor to change the text of a bill. But I cannot understand allowing them to sign those changes into law. It seems like that would mean they could creatively reverse the meaning of any bill.

It seems like a governor should be able to approve the text as written, or change it and send it back.

What am I missing?

The original intention was to allow for what is called a "line-item veto." Let's say you had a bill (and this is not uncommon) with a lot of basically unrelated provisions. It creates programs A, B and C. This would allow the governor to approve A and C but not B, and would prevent the sort of "horse-trading" that legislators like to do ("I'll support your pet idea if you support mine").

That was the idea. But Wisconsin has twisted into something else entirely. Arguably, the idea was not a good one to begin with, anyway.

Okay that makes a kind of sense in the case stated but even there seems open to creative abuse in cases where those lines are not wholly independent. Thanks for the information.

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