Dan O’Donnell on why Governor Evers was so bold in using a veto long banned by the Wisconsin Constitution.
July 19, 2023
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
Let’s be perfectly clear here: Governor Evers’ “Vanna White veto” allocating untold billions of state dollars to public schools for the next 402(!) years is unconstitutional. You know it, I know it, and inasmuch as Evers is actually aware of what he does in office, he knows it.
In 1990, voters by a 2-1 margin approved an amendment to Article V, Section 10 of the Wisconsin Constitution that reads, in relevant part, “the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill.”
If the Constitution is that plain, why did Evers believe he had the authority to strike the number 20 and the hyphen from the phrase “2024-25” to create the number “2425?” It’s as clear as the unconstitutionality of his move—he knows he can get away with it.
On August 1, Supreme Court Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz will be sworn in, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the state’s highest court for the first time in more than 15 years. Easily the most overtly partisan hack to ever win a seat on the Supreme Court, Protasiewicz spent months campaigning on promises to fulfill every liberal dullard’s wildest fever dreams.
Abortions on demand? Janet will grant them. An electoral map gerrymandered for Democrats? Your wish is her command. Billions in school funding for the next four centuries that the Legislature never approved? That’s a no-brainer (kind of like Protasiewicz herself).
(9/14) Protasiewicz said I can’t tell you how I would decide but I can tell you my values – the Dobbs decision was the definition of judicial activism, 3 generations of women have relied on Roe and women need to make this decision.
— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) January 9, 2023
She wasn’t elected—or selected as the left’s candidate—for her judicial acumen; she was put in position to be the deciding “yes” vote on the exact sort of unconstitutional garbage that Evers is already pulling. Any lawsuit challenging his Vanna White veto will get to the Supreme Court only after Protasiewicz is on it, and he knows that there is no chance that Protasiewicz or fellow yes-women Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet, and Jill Karofsky would ever try to stop him.
That’s a chilling thought, isn’t it? The Governor knows he is saddling his state with 402 years’ worth of unsustainable spending by unconstitutionally usurping the Legislature’s authority in direct opposition to an overwhelming majority of Wisconsinites who specifically amended their constitution to block such an action, but he is doing it anyway because he knows he can.
He knows Protasiewicz, Walsh Bradley, Dallet, and Karofsky are either too legally ignorant (entirely possible and evident to anyone who has ever read any of their unintentionally hilarious opinions) or too blindly and willfully partisan to raise even the most obvious constitutional objections.
One of them could, of course, surprise everyone and hold that the constitutional amendment banning Vanna White vetoes prohibits Evers from using a Vanna White veto, but no one—least of all Evers himself—thinks they will.
What exactly does that say about the state of the liberal judiciary generally and the four liberal justices specifically? Legislative Republicans should bring a lawsuit to the court specifically to show how Protasiewicz, Walsh Bradley, Karofsky, and Dallet debase themselves and destroy the notion of a fair court as they craft another unintentionally hilarious defense of a grossly and obviously unconstitutional action.
Seriously, show the state; show the world what passes for liberal intellect on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. More importantly, show the country the dangers of allowing any institution to fall into leftist hands. Show how there is no norm, no rule, no constitutional amendment that won’t be sacrificed at the altar of liberal policy.
Show everyone who cares about the consequences of elections the hilarious lengths these alleged jurists will go to put their stamp of approval on the most obvious of unlawful vetoes.