Via TNR's Josh Patashnik (here and here), the New York Times has run two hilarious articles in the last few days on the strange things that happen in state politics. The first tells the story of a referendum that ends the Wisconsin governor's bizarre ability to edit specific words out of bills:
Wisconsin governors have long been allowed to sign off on budget bills but do some tricky erasing first. They could delete words, numbers, sentences, paragraphs or some combination of all of those, to create entirely new meanings never intended by the original authors — a legislative twist on the game of Mad Libs.
Like when Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, scratched out some 700 words from a section of the 2005 budget bill, leaving behind just 20 words that, when stitched back together, moved $427 million from the transportation fund to education.
But on Tuesday, Wisconsin voters put an end to some of the governor’s fancy editing power. Seventy-one percent of voters favored a referendum that read to outsiders like some indecipherable grammar lesson, barring the governor from creating “a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences.” Wisconsin voters, who have been living with the unusual “partial veto” (distinct from the more common line-item veto) since 1930, needed little translation.
They have fought (and laughed) over this before. Voters limited the veto once before, in 1990, rejecting what critics then called the “Vanna White veto,” allowing a governor to cross out letters inside words to make whole new words.
With the letter-flipping practice banned, critics, led by Republican legislators, this time re-named their target the “Frankenstein veto,” focusing on the governor’s ability to merge whole sentences through deletions, and thus, they said, cobble together weird bits of provisions to create whatever monster one cared to.
The Frankenstein veto graphic has to been to be believed -- how could this really happen?
Then there was this report on Arkansas legislators passing a law with the opposite meaning of what they intended:
Last year, the state legislature botched a law intended to make 18 the minimum age for marriage, instead mistakenly removing the limit entirely.
As long as they had the consent of their parents, children--no matter how young--could have demanded matrimonial bonds under the law passed in error in 2007: “In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage.”
The idea was to allow an exception for teenagers who were pregnant. The problem was with the “not,” which crept in by accident, according to Representative Will Bond, who sponsored the bill.
Oops.
For a useful overview of the partial veto in WI, look here:
http://www.legis.state.wi.us/lrb/pubs/ib/04ib1.pdf
Posted by: Walsh | April 08, 2008 at 03:28 PM