Oops! WI Governor uses outlawed veto power, breaks law.

It looks like in all the hurry to strategically veto things from the newly-passed Wisconsin state budget, Jim Doyle forgot(?) he's not as powerful as he used to be. After last cycle's budget, when he selectively deleted words from several items to create new sentences and raise the state property tax by more than 150%, and the previous budget year, when he appropriated millions of dollars from the state transportation fund-- the all-powerful "Frankenstein veto" was finally banned. The veto allowed Wisconsin governors, Democrat and Republican, enormous freedoms in vetoing language from appropriations bills - and often, as a result, creating new items within those bills, with little recourse available for the legislature.

But it's back? The Wisconsin State Journal reports that, albeit in a "minor" policy item, Doyle very clearly used the unconstitutional technique to cancel the creation of a committee to study facilities caring for the mentally retarded. In the post-error scramble, it's not yet clear what will happen to the vetoed item. And it's still not quite clear what happened that led Doyle to do it in the first place. His office blames the need for haste in approving the bill before the July 1st deadline, admittedly admirable given the budget hasn't been on time for years, but isn't it more important that we don't have to go back and fix problems for which we have very little legal precedent?