In the past few days, two Democratic governors dealing with hostile Republican legislatures have managed to use the line-item veto to score some amazing political victories.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers is facing one of the most aggressively gerrymandered legislatures in the country. Evers had to get clever in order to fight for his priorities. Wisconsin governors cannot strike individual words and letters from bills anymore. But there is nothing saying they can’t fool around with numbers.
The Wisconsin Legislature approved a boost in funding through the 2024-2025 school year. The governor then took his handy veto pen and crossed out the “20” along with the hyphen, changing “2024 [hyphen] 25” to “2425.” So Evers managed to extend school funding in Wisconsin by more than 400 years.
Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro also got creative with his veto power in a state with a divided legislature. Shapiro negotiated an expansion of public school funding. But in order to pass the bill through the Republican Senate, he also had to whip votes for a controversial compromise that would subsidize private schools with voucher programs. Then Shapiro pulled a fast one. After the bill passed the Senate, but before it passed the Democratic House on Wednesday night, Shapiro announced he would use the line-item veto to knock the promised school voucher program compromise off the final bill.
All of this brings me back to two major points: The first is that I think the case against the line-item veto is pretty strong. Around the country, 44 states currently allow their governors to wield this type of power, with Wisconsin granting its governor an especially powerful and targeted veto. Going forward, we should probably find bipartisan consensus and find a way to get rid of it. But when you are elected to office as a Democrat, you must wield the power you have on things that you believe in and that you promise to deliver. And in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, we have got two pretty good examples of leaders using this very imperfect power to achieve just that.
This is an adapted excerpt from the July 6 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).