I was curious, so I looked up the amended wording, which is
(b) If the governor approves and signs the bill, the bill shall
become law. Appropriation bills may be approved in whole or
in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law.
(c) In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor
may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the
words of the enrolled bill, and may not create a new sentence by
combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill.
I guess I don’t know how strictly laws are usually interpreted with respect to the distinction between letters in words vs digits in numbers, but I think I would expect the court to rule against Evers here; striking digits seems to be clearly against the spirit of the amendment. On the flip side, though, the partial veto has enough of an established history of gamesmanship that I would also buy the argument that an amendment intended to ban striking digits should be expected to spell that out.
To reply to myself again as I keep going down this rabbit hole, the opinion in Citizens Utility Board v. Klauser, 534 N.W.2d 608 (Wis. 1995) includes
Thus, the amendment as ratified by the citizenry only limits the governor’s veto of letters and keeps intact the Wisconsin Senate conclusion that the governor has the authority to “reduce or eliminate numbers and amounts of appropriations” and exercise a “partial veto resulting in a reduction in an appropriation.”
A “reduction in appropriation” is clearly not what happened here, but the distinction between letters and numbers is apparently, at least in the opinion for this case, intentional.
I was curious, so I looked up the amended wording, which is
I guess I don’t know how strictly laws are usually interpreted with respect to the distinction between letters in words vs digits in numbers, but I think I would expect the court to rule against Evers here; striking digits seems to be clearly against the spirit of the amendment. On the flip side, though, the partial veto has enough of an established history of gamesmanship that I would also buy the argument that an amendment intended to ban striking digits should be expected to spell that out.
To reply to myself again as I keep going down this rabbit hole, the opinion in Citizens Utility Board v. Klauser, 534 N.W.2d 608 (Wis. 1995) includes
A “reduction in appropriation” is clearly not what happened here, but the distinction between letters and numbers is apparently, at least in the opinion for this case, intentional.