A fascinating read from the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau about the history of this remarkably potent veto: <a href="https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lrb/reading_the_constitution/reading_the_constitution_4_1.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lrb/reading_the_consti...</a><p>Long ago, Wisconsin added a clause to their state constitution to allow the governor to approve appropriation bills "in whole or in part." No language specified what that actually meant, and so the state supreme court has basically said that as long as the result is a valid law, then the use of the veto is valid. This is true even when the result directly reverses legislative intent, such as vetoing the word "not." The court has also found that the governor is not restricted to the actual digits in quantities -- for instance, if the legislature appropriates $50M for something, then the governor can reduce that to $18M because the missing $32M difference is "a part" of what the bill contained.<p>The partial veto received a partial nerf in 1990 and again in 2008, with amendments that combine to read: "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." This leaves plenty of room for shenanigans.<p>The legislature has frequently litigated the use of partial veto in the past, hoping to limit its power. This might be another time they do that.
I'd be curious to know if the existence of this unique veto power has led to a local stylistic specialization in writing the language of proposed bills to be as decontextualization-proof as possible.<p>Such a skill would be very useful for academics who expect to be interviewed about their work by members of the media.<p>It would also be interesting to see if an llm could be tweaked to produce content with semantic and narrational qualities that made cherry picking extremely difficult to do without being obvious, while also not making the original text fatiguing to follow.
Polish Parliament 2002 "or magazines"<p><a href="https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/(%E2%80%A6)_lub_czasopisma?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/(%E2%80%A6)_l...</a><p>"or magazines – a fragment of a sentence removed from the governmental draft amendment to the Broadcasting Act adopted in 2002 , changing the sense and scope of some of the key provisions of this act.<p>In the original wording of the bill adopted by the government, Article 36 referred to the prohibition of issuing licenses for nationwide television to "the publisher of a nationwide daily or magazine" . In March 2002, as established by the parliamentary investigative committee on the Rywin scandal , Janina Sokołowska and Iwona Galińska (officials of the National Broadcasting Council ) and Tomasz Łopacki (a lawyer from the Ministry of Culture) deleted two words from the project: or magazines , which prohibited the granting of licenses would still apply to publishers of dailies , but would no longer apply to publishers of weeklies or other periodicalsnot journals. The intention of the authors of this manipulation was to enable Agora 's competitors (the publisher of the Gazeta Wyborcza daily) to apply for a concession .<p>When the words were crossed out, Lew Rywin came to Agora , proposing in exchange for a bribe of 17.5 million dollars , to change the text of the bill so as to allow the company to apply for a television license. This visit marked the beginning of the Rywin affair ; after it was made public, the government reinstated the two words in its own bill, explaining their disappearance by an alleged "technical glitch"."
Looking at the US system (gerrymandering, party politics, corruption etc), I actually think the governor "passing" legislation like this is an improvement for many places. It seems more democratic and more accountable to me...