Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 7:04, and sunset is 6:18, for 11 hours, 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous, with 58.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1986,  Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Iceland to continue discussions about scaling back IRBM arsenals in Europe.

Months ago, Gov. Evers used his partial veto authority as governor to alter legislation so that a school funding increase would continue for 400 years. The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in June to take a case challenging that partial veto. See FREE WHITEWATER, Wisconsin Supreme Court Considers Gubernatorial Partial Veto. At the time, I wrote that

Evers’s expansion of the legislative funding until 2425 was unexpected (and I’d argue that expansion goes too far). And yet, and yet, his actions are a clever expression (and send-up) of political gamesmanship. I don’t know Evers’s childhood reading and viewing habits. Still, his partial veto suggests someone who enjoyed the irony and satire of Mad magazine or has a Bugs-Bunny-level cleverness.)

Well, the case went to oral argument before Wisconsin’s high court, and the justices are perplexed, as Scott Bauer reports:

Justices appeared to agree that limits were needed, but they grappled with where to draw the line.

When legal scholars and others look at what Wisconsin courts have allowed relative to partial vetoes, “they think it’s crazy because it is crazy,” said Justice Brian Hagedorn. “We allow governors to unilaterally create law that has not been proposed to them at all. It is a mess of this court’s making.”

The initial reaction from anyone would be that a 400-year veto is “extreme,” said Justice Rebecca Dallet, but the question is whether it’s within the governor’s authority to use the partial veto to extend the duration of dates.

….

Wisconsin’s partial veto power was created by a 1930 constitutional amendment, but it’s been weakened over the years, including in reaction to vetoes made by former governors, both Republicans and Democrats.

Voters adopted constitutional amendments in 1990 and 2008 that removed the ability to strike individual letters to make new words — the “Vanna White” veto — and the power to eliminate words and numbers in two or more sentences to create a new sentence — the “Frankenstein” veto. 

The lawsuit before the court on Wednesday contends that Evers’ partial veto is barred under the 1990 constitutional amendment prohibiting the “Vanna White” veto, named the co-host of the game show Wheel of Fortune who flips letters to reveal word phrases.

But Evers argued that the “Vanna White” veto ban applies only to striking individual letters to create new words, not vetoing digits to create new numbers.

Listen to this week’s oral argument in Jeffery A LeMieux v. Tony Evers via download @ https://devwww.wicourts.gov/scoa-media/2024AP000729_20241009.mp3

The court may decide to reject Evers’s approach, but prior changes to the partial veto came through a state constitutional amendment. Why, then, should the court decide now? Wisconsin voters can, through amendment, alter the partial veto in many ways, or eliminate it entirely.

There’s too much, too far, or too long, and there there’s what method to limit too much, too far, or too long.

The gubernatorial partial veto’s limits can and should be addressed by voters through a constitutional amendment.

Voters can (and should) be the ones to fix this kind of crazy.

Black hole shreds star and has moved on to another target: