On November 23, 2026, Wisconsin voters will confront a question that goes to the heart of representative government: Who has the power to increase your taxes? For years, the answer in Wisconsin has been the governor, alone, with a pen. The Wisconsin Prohibit Partial Veto to Increase Tax or Fee Amendment asks voters to change that.
But first, some important context.
Wisconsin first granted the governor partial veto power over appropriation bills in 1930. The idea was reasonable. It gave the executive a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer when dealing with spending legislation, allowing the governor to strike some provisions while letting the rest become law.
But according to the State Court Report, governors did not stop there. By 1990, the partial veto had been stretched so far that governors were striking individual letters from words to create entirely new language. Voters stepped in and banned it. In 2008, they had to step in again, this time to stop governors from combining fragments of separate sentences to manufacture new ones.
The line item veto can be a powerful tool, but like all government power, it can be subject to abuse. And today, another event Wisconsinites are tasked with reforming the power once more to prohibit the governor from using the partial veto to create or increase any tax or fee.
Governor Evers has made the case for why this matters. In 2023, the legislature passed a two-year school funding increase. Evers used his partial veto to delete digits and punctuation from the bill, changing “the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year” to “2023-2425.” A two-year increase became an increase that would last 400-years. Nobody voted for it or approved it. But someday, your great-great-grandchildren will pay for it.
As Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, who proposed said,”No governor, Republican or Democrat, should be able to single-handedly raise taxes on Wisconsin families with the stroke of his pen. The governor is not a king.”
There is one more issue voters should not overlook. The partial veto did not automatically allocate additional state dollars, but it gave school districts the authority to raise property taxes to meet the increased revenue limits. As Senate President Mary Felzkowski put it, “It doesn’t matter if it’s via property taxes or income taxes, this money is going to come out of the pockets of Wisconsinites from Tomahawk to Racine.”
Opponents argue the debate is settled. In April 2025, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the veto 4-3, with the majority ruling that the state constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much it changes policy.
But the dissent put it plainly. Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote that the majority’s ruling allows the governor to take “the collection of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks he receives from the legislature, cross out whatever he pleases, and out comes a new law never considered or passed by the legislature at all.” He called it “a mockery of our constitutional order.”
Constitutional or not – Wisconsin has the chance to fix it.
