GOP mulls using AI to sidestep governor's veto power after 400-year funding trick: report

Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are scrambling to come up with ideas on how to limit Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' unusually expansive veto powers — including possibly by crafting their budget bills using artificial intelligence models, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday.

This comes after Evers used a bizarre quirk of his office's veto powers to transform a two-year school funding increase he felt was too restrictive into a funding increase each year for 402 years.

"Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said April 22 his caucus would discuss ways to craft the 2025-27 state budget in a way that reduces opportunities for Evers to use his partial veto authority in a manner similar to an edit he made in the last state budget that extended funding increases for schools for 402 years," reported Molly Beck.

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Vos told reporters during an interview on WISN-AM, "We are already meeting with our attorneys. We've begun the process of saying, 'How can we work around this ruling?' If the court says you can strike digits and numbers, well, now we'll have to not use digits and numbers. And the best thing about technology and AI is that, you know, in the push of a button, it can all be done."

Another last-resort option they are reportedly considering is to simply not pass a budget at all.

In many states, governors have more power over the veto process for the legislature than the president does over congressional bills; they can use what's called a "line-item veto" to only strike portions of the bill they don't like, allowing other sections to pass.

But in Wisconsin, thanks to how the state constitution is written, governors have an unusually creative line-item veto power that lets them strike individual words and punctuation from sentences, potentially changing the bill's meaning into something totally different than what was passed.

In this case, Evers took a line from the budget which read, "For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325" per student, and crossed out the digits "2024," the second hyphen, and a few other words to make it instead say the increases would be through "2023-2425."

Republicans sued to attempt to overturn this trick, but the liberal majority on the state Supreme Court upheld it last week.

News that the GOP is looking to neuter this power triggered mockery from commenters on social media, with Civic Media editor Dan Shafer posting, "One option they could try — and hear me out, this is a foreign concept to the current legislature — is passing a budget the governor would want to sign."