Listen To This Story

Wisconsin Democrats celebrated a “victory” this week when the state’s Supreme Court ruled along party lines that Gov. Tony Evers (D) was within his rights when he made a rather creative use of his partial veto power to include a 400-year school funding increase in a spending bill enacted by the gerrymandered GOP majority.

Everything about this should upset Americans.

Earlier this month, the people of Wisconsin elected a liberal judge to maintain the Democrat’s 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court. The race cost $100 million, and each candidate ran on a partisan agenda. But the law should not be partisan, and judges shouldn’t have agendas.

We are seeing where that leads when right-wing ideologues like Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito are sitting on the Supreme Court.

Then there are Wisconsin’s hyper-gerrymandered districts, which give Republicans a 6-2 edge in the state’s congressional delegation and large majorities in the state legislature even though it is one of the most closely divided in the nation.

That, too, is undemocratic.

Finally, we have the way in which Evers exercised his partial veto.

He changed a spending bill that increased the amount of money public schools could raise per student in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 fiscal years by striking the 20 and the hyphen to change the text of the bill to 2023-2425.

That cannot possibly be the intention of the law.

The liberal majority on the court saw it differently, however.

In this case, we side with the GOP minority, which, of course, has made many undemocratic rulings when it had the upper hand, including upholding this veto authority when Republican governors made use of it.

While the majority seemed to look for a way to justify its preferred outcome, the minority made a lot more sense in its argument.

“How does a bill become a law? According to the majority, one option looks like this: The legislature passes a bill in both houses and sends it to the governor,” the conservative justices wrote. “The governor then takes the collection of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks he receives from the legislature, crosses out whatever he pleases, and — presto! — out comes a new law never considered or passed by the legislature at all.”

The justices acknowledge that this problem has been a long time in the making (without admitting their own culpability in exacerbating it) and has now given governors “the monarchical authority […] to create brand new laws from scratch.”

Wisconsin’s problem is one that we observe across the country.

Because Democrats and Republicans hardly ever try to work together anymore, they are treating democracy like a full-contact sport in which they exploit every loophole to gain an edge in a never-ending game of one-upmanship.

As we have documented many times, the GOP does this more frequently and more ruthlessly, as its current effort to steal a Supreme Court seat in North Carolina demonstrates. However, as this example shows, if given the chance, Democrats will also use all levers of power to subvert democracy to ensure they get their way, no matter how absurd their methods are.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.