Court Opinion

ID: 9698174
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:44:03.445608+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:39.138026
License: Public Domain

CONNOR T. HANSEN, <J.
(concurring in part, dissenting in part).
The majority of the court holds that Assembly Bill 664 was an appropriation bill and that, under the facts of this case, the partial veto should not be invalidated because the governor did not timely return the enrolled bill or the part partially vetoed to the assembly. I concur in the result reached by the majority on these issues.
However, I believe that a comment is appropriate with regard to the procedures followed by governors in recent years when exercising their powers of partial veto. The parties have stipulated that neither the enrolled bill, nor the parts of the bill disapproved, nor the language of the parts approved, were delivered to the legislature by the governor in the present case. Instead, the governor submitted a veto message setting forth the fact that he had partially vetoed the bill and a letter stating his objections to the bill as enacted.
The fact is that the return of the governor to the legislature did not identify the exact wording objected to, nor was this wording made known to the legislature within the six days prescribed in art. V, sec. 10 of the Wisconsin Constitution for the return of the vetoed portions of the bill. Precise copies of the enrolled bill, showing the parts vetoed, were subsequently made available to the legislature as a result of informal procedures adopted by the Legislative Reference Bureau.
Affidavits and tabulations filed with this court in connection with this case show that the practice of previous *717governors has not been consistent. The practice in the years immediately following creation of the partial veto power was generally to return the enrolled bill to the originating house for review of the partial veto. The parties disagree as to the practice in succeeding years, but it is clear, from the information supplied by the parties, that the practice has varied, not only from one governor to the next, but from one veto to the next.
The absence of any formalized or consistent procedure has, in part, made this litigation necessary and is likely to contribute to future litigation. I am mindful that this court will not interfere with the internal procedures of the legislature. However, we are concerned here not only with the integrity of the legislative process itself, but also with the provisions of the constitution authorizing the exercise of the partial veto power.
Under these circumstances, I would deem it appropriate for this court to specify procedures for the return by a governor of the portions of a bill objected to. Since the court has declined to prescribe such procedures, it would be proper for the legislature to consider doing so, consistent with the opinion of the court.
I specifically note that recent governors have discontinued the practice, followed by certain of their predecessors, of setting forth verbatim the portions stricken from partially vetoed bills in their veto messages to the legislature.
Unofficial reproductions of the vetoed portions are available through the informal procedures of the Legislative Reference Bureau, and the legislature is not, as a practical matter, left in profound ignorance of the executive action. Nevertheless, under the present practice, the legislature is not timely provided with an official version of the bill as partially vetoed.
The dignity and integrity of the legislative process would be better served, and future litigation avoided, by *718the establishment of procedures to guarantee at least a minimum of regularity in the return of a partial veto to the originating house.
“. . . [T]he extraordinary character and far reaching consequences of the act of veto are some indication of a necessity that it shall be exercised with a regularity and orderliness commensurate with its importance.” Tuttle v. Boston, 215 Mass. 57, 60, 102 N.E. 350 (1913).
I respectfully dissent from the holding of the majority that the power of partial veto, as exercised in this case, is a valid exercise of that authority.
In the Wisconsin Constitution, as in the federal constitution, the principle of separation of powers is nowhere expressly stated, but it is recognized as implicit in the provisions vesting the legislative, executive and judicial powers of the state in the respective branches of government. Our constitution provides for three branches of government, separate and co-ordinate, each supreme in its sphere and independent of the others. None may perform the functions or exercise the powers of another. This court has jealously guarded this concept, in the belief that an invasion of the province of one branch by another is an attack upon the constitutional foundation of the government itself, and in a sense, upon the liberty of our citizens. State ex rel. Broughton v. Zimmerman, 261 Wis. 398, 404, 405, 410, 411, 52 N.W.2d 903 (1952); Goodland v. Zimmerman, 243 Wis. 459, 466, 467,10 N.W.2d 180 (1943) ; State ex rel. Rodd v. Verage, 177 Wis. 295, 322, 187 N.W. 830 (1922); In re Appointment of Revisor, 141 Wis. 592, 596,124 N.W. 670 (1910).
Although there have developed between the several branches of government “great borderlands of power” in which it is difficult to determine where the functions of one branch end and those of another begin, In re Appointment of Revisor, supra, at 597, it is nonetheless *719the province and the duty of the judicial branch of government to mark the constitutional boundaries of each branch and to remedy invasions by one branch of the territory of another. State ex rel. Mueller v. Thompson, 149 Wis. 488, 137 N.W. 20 (1912).
Article IY, section 1, of our constitution provides that “The legislative power shall be vested in a senate and an assembly.” The constitutional role of the governor in the legislative process includes the power to convene special sessions of the legislature; to communicate with, and make recommendations to, the legislature; to direct the preparation of the financial budget; and to veto bills which have been passed by the legislature, Art. V, secs. 4 and 10, Wisconsin Constitution, and sec. 16.46, Stats., State ex rel. Sundby v. Adamany, 71 Wis.2d 118, 131, 237 N.W.2d 910 (1976). Nevertheless, the fundamental concept of Art. IV, sec. 1, is that the legislative power of this state is confined exclusively to the legislature. State ex rel. Broughton v. Zimmerman, supra, at 405, 410; Goodland v. Zimmerman, supra, at 467; In re Appointment of Revisor, supra, at 597, 598; see: State ex rel. McCormack v. Foley, 18 Wis.2d 274, 277, 118 N.W.2d 211 (1962). Unless we are prepared to abandon that concept — and I am not prepared to do so — then there must be some palpable limit to the power of the governor to rewrite, by the device of the partial veto, bills which have passed the legislature.
In recent years, partial vetoes have not only increased greatly in number; they have been applied to ever smaller portions of bills. Several years ago, an attempt was made to exercise the power so as to strike the digit “2” from a $25 million bonding authorization. Even this may not mark the limits of the use of the power. Ad-visors to a recent governor were reported to have considered striking the letter “t” from the word “thereafter” in order to alter the effective date of a liquor tax *720increase. Only the limitations on one’s imagination fix the outer limits of the exercise of the partial veto power by incision or deletion by a creative person. At some point this creative negative constitutes the enacting of legislation by one person, and at precisely that point the governor invades the exclusive power of the legislature to make laws.
Long before the advent of the partial veto, the father of the doctrine of separation of powers, Baron de Montesquieu, warned that liberty would be endangered if the executive were to have the power of ordaining laws by his own authority or of amending what had been ordained by others, and he urged that the executive should have no part in legislating other than the privilege of rejecting what had been enacted by the legislature.1 I believe Montesquieu was correct. In the scheme of our constitution, the governor is to review the laws and not to write them. He is not, by careful and ingenious deletions, to effectively “write with his eraser” and to devise new bills which will become law unless disapproved by two-thirds of the legislators who are elected by the people of the state.
In principle, this is clear enough. What gives pause to the majority, I suspect, is the difficulty of applying these principles to concrete cases, especially under the approach used by this court in State ex rel. Sundby v. Adamany, supra, and the majority in the instant case. This is so because the exercise of the partial veto power by the executive shades into the powers of the legislature. As the Sundby Case recognized, every veto has both an affirmative and a negative ring about it. Every veto necessarily works some change of policy, and in a sense partakes of legislating. Here lies the difficulty *721the majority confronts in saying precisely where the proper sphere of the executive ends and that of the legislature begins.
The majority is rightfully wary of the elusive tests enunciated in some other jurisdictions. To hold that the exercise of the partial veto power may not have an “affirmative,” “positive” or “creative” effect on legislation, or that the veto may not change the “meaning” or “policy” of a bill, as some courts elsewhere have done, would be to involve this court in disengenuous semantic games. While these tests may be appealing in the abstract, they are unworkable in practice. Every veto may be perceived in affirmative or negative terms, and as either conforming to or defying the general legislative intent, depending upon the observer’s perspective. These tests are inescapably subjective. Without an objective point of reference, this court would be reduced to deciding cases upon its subjective assessment of the respective policies espoused by the legislature and the executive, an unseemly result which would foster uncertainty in the legislative process. More importantly, such a result would defeat its own purpose; the judicial department may no more assume the proper functions of the legislature, or interfere with their discharge, than may the governor.
Perhaps for this reason, the decisions of this court have steadily fashioned a standard which affords the governor virtually unlimited power to rework legislation by means of the partial veto. In the early cases of State ex rel. Wisconsin Tel Co. v. Henry, 218 Wis. 302, 260 N.W. 486 (1935), and State ex rel. Martin v. Zimmerman, 233 Wis. 442, 289 N.W. 662 (1940), this court focused on the question whether the portions of a bill remaining after the exercise of the partial veto power provided a complete and workable law, but also required that the parts vetoed be severable, and implied, without *722so holding, that parts which constituted conditions, contingencies, or provisos imposed by the legislature could not be severed. In the recent Sundby Case, supra, this court reiterated the limited requirement that the portions of the bill approved by the governor must provide a complete, workable law, and emphasized that the governor was free to change the policy of the bill as enacted by the legislature,. Again, however, the court held open, without deciding, the possibility that portions of a bill which are contingencies, provisos, or conditions, might not be separable. Therefore, until the present case, this court, at least by dicta, has recognized that there must be some limitation on the exercise of the partial veto by the governor.
The majority now jettisons the never-applied exception for “conditions, provisos and contingencies,” and, for all practical purposes, any other limitation on the pai'tial veto power. This step is no doubt logical and necessary for the majority to hold that, “The power of the Governor to disassemble the law is coextensive with the power of the Legislature to assemble its provisions initially.” When the court holds that a governor may freely alter the evident intent or policy of the legislature, it is no doubt consistent to permit him to remove conditions and contingencies, which, after all, are no more than manifestations of legislative policy or intent. However, this writer is unable to find language in art V, sec. 10, to support such a sweeping construction of the partial veto power, nor has attention been directed to authorities in this state or any other state which would suggest that such was the intent of the 1930 constitutional amendment which created that power.
Having discarded the provisos-and-conditions exception, the majority holds that a partial veto of an appropriation bill is valid, provided only that “the net result . . . is a complete, entire, and workable bill which the *723legislature itself could have passed in the first instance.” In my opinion this court has gone too far and should retrace its steps. The standard approved today gives the governor wide, and for all practical purposes, unlimited, authority to exercise power reserved by the constitution to the legislature. In reality, the purported ■limitation that the remainder of any bill, after the exercise of a partial veto, must be a workable law, imposes little constraint upon such a usurpation of legislative power. It is difficult to envisage a governor deliberately exercising the partial veto power so as to produce a fragmentary or unworkable law.
Although in Sundby, supra, we held open the question whether a governor could alter an appropriation bill by striking a portion of an appropriation figure, the test stated by the majority affords no discernible basis for objection to such a veto, if the remainder of the bill is workable. Further, in the case before us, the legislature provided for the collection and disbursement of a voluntary payment by the taxpayer. By exercise of the partial veto power, the governor has effectively increased an appropriation by producing a charge on the general fund of an estimated $600,000 per annum.2 Under the test pronounced by the majority it therefore becomes unobjectionable to increase an appropriation by the exercise of the partial veto power.
Even more disturbingly, the standard adopted by the court poses no discernible obstacle to the use of deletions to produce a complete, entire and workable bill concerning a subject utterly unrelated to that of the bill as passed by the legislature. Might an appropriation for a *724gubernatorial commission be transformed to provide the governor with a second salary? In all probability we will not soon face such a question, but the clear lesson of experience is that we ought not discount such ingenuity. I am unable to identify, in the majority opinion, even an implicit obstacle to such an abuse of the veto power. I fear that the court may now have painted itself into a corner, and that a time may come when we regret having done so.
The original purposes of the partial veto power, and the language of this court’s early decisions defining that power, suggest an alternative solution, a solution that, in my opinion, would be consistent with the purposes of the partial veto power, provide a neutral benchmark from which the actions of the governor might be measured, and also preserve the prerogatives of the legislature.
The purpose of the partial veto power was described in State ex rel. Martin v. Zimmerman, supra, at 447, 448:
“Sec. 10, art. V, of our state constitution is not ambiguous. As amended in 1930 it must be construed as a whole. In so construing it we entertain no doubt either as to the reason for, or the meaning of, the 1930 amendment _. . . Its purpose was to prevent, if possible, the adoption of omnibus appropriation bills, logrolling, the practice of jumbling together in one act inconsistent subjects in order to force a passage by uniting minorities with different interests when the particular provisions could not pass on their separate merits, with riders of objectionable legislation attached to general appropriation bills in order to force the governor to veto the entire bill and thus stop the wheels of government or approve the obnoxious act. Very definite evils were inherent in the lawmaking processes in connection with appropriation measures. Both the legislature and the people deemed it advisable to confer power upon the governor to approve appropriation bills in whole or in part. . . .”
The partial veto power was therefore directed toward the legislative practice of uniting in a single bill various *725proposals, each of which would have constituted a complete and workable bill in itself.
Prior to the constitutional amendment, the improper joinder of such proposals prevented the governor from dealing separately with each “part” which would otherwise have constituted a separate proposal. The partial veto provisions gave the governor power to unpack omnibus appropriation bills, and to pass separately upon each of the constituent parts which, if not for the practice of jumbling bills together, would have been enacted individually, and would have constituted a complete, entire and workable bill.
The governor’s power to dismantle an appropriations bill was made as extensive as the legislative’s power to construct such a bill from independent proposals capable of separate enactment.
I believe this is what this court had in mind when, in the first case to consider the scope of the partial veto power, it described the power to be “coextensive as the legislature’s power to join and enact separable pieces of legislation in an appropriation bill.” State ex rel. Wisconsin Tel. Co. v. Henry, supra, at 315. The court explained :
“. . . As the legislature can do that in this state [join and enact separable pieces of legislation in a single bill], there are reasons why the governor should have a coextensive power of partial veto, to enable him to pass, in the exercise of his gmsi-Iegislative function, on each separable piece of legislation or law on its own merits. That is not necessary in many states because they have constitutional provisions which prohibit the legislature from passing a bill which contains more than one subject. Wisconsin, however, has no such prohibition except as to private and local bills (sec. 18, art. IV, Wis. Const.). As far as general legislation is concerned, the legislature may, if it pleases, unite as many subjects in one bill as it chooses. Therefore, in order to check or prevent the evil consequences of improper joinder, so far, at least, as *726appropriation bills are concerned, it may well have been deemed necessary, in the interest of good government, to confer upon the governor, as was done by the amendment in 1930 of sec. 10, art. V, Wisconsin constitution, the right to pass independently on every separable piece of legislation in an appropriation bill.” State ex rel. Wisconsin Tel. Co. v. Henry, supra, at 315. (Emphasis added.)
This, in my opinion, is an accurate statement of the purposes and nature of the partial veto power of the governor. The power thus conferred is not a power to reduce a bill to its single phrases, words, letters, digits and punctuation marks. Rather the partial veto power should be exercised only as to the individual components, capable of separate enactment, which have been joined together by the legislature in an appropriation bill. That is, the portions stricken must be able to stand as a complete and workable bill.
Also, as stated by the majority, the portions of a bill approved by the governor must constitute a complete, entire, and workable law. However, I do not consider this “limitation” to say anything which is not implicitly true of every legislative enactment. Any enactment, whether passed by the legislature and approved by the governor, or created by use of the partial veto power, will fail if it is fragmentary, patently incomplete, or incapable of execution.
The approach here set forth would effectively define the limits of the constitutional role of the governor. He would be able to veto independent elements of multi-subject appropriation bills, and would in most cases be unable to effectively add elements to the bills enacted by the legislature. His veto would be directed to portions of an appropriation bill which were grammatically and structurally distinct, and he would not be able to deal individually with numbers or words, or single digits or letters.
*727Equally important, this standard would be capable of even-handed and predictable application, and this court would not be required to mediate policy disagreements between the two other coordinate branches of our government. Most important, this approach would protect the prerogatives reserved to the legislature by the constitution and would fulfill the responsibility of this court to determine when the exclusive territory of one of our independent branches has been invaded by another.
It appears that we have now arrived at a stage where one person can design his own legislation from the appropriation bills submitted to him after they have been approved by the majority of the legislature. The laws thus designed by one person become the law of the sovereign State of Wisconsin unless disapproved by two-thirds of the legislators. I am not persuaded that art. V, sec. 10, was ever intended to produce such a result.
There can be no question that the partial vetoes presently before the court do not meet the standard herein set forth. The governor partially vetoed section 51 of the bill as passed by the legislature by striking the words “that their income tax liability be increased by,” and the words “deposit into.” There is no method by which these portions can be said to constitute an independent legislative proposal capable of separate enactment, and I would therefore hold that the governor has exceeded the limits of the power conferred upon him by the partial veto provision, and has improperly assumed power reserved to the legislature.

 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Vol. I, Book XI, Chapter 6 (Hafner, New York, 1966), 166, 169, 160.

 If the increased appropriation effected in this case is not apparent (the majority concludes that the governor’s veto “left the appropriation untouched”), such a veto can readily be imagined. For example, a bill providing for appropriation of a fixed sum in “every other month” might be increased by striking the word “other.”