Gov. Evers Keeps Rising in Stature

Gov. Tony Evers. Photo by Emily Hamer / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

It was amusing to hear how outraged the Republicans were about Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ far-reaching vetos of the state budget.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos blasted Evers for using “trickery” that was “very unprecedented” and “outside the norm.”

“These vetoes aren’t the work of a rational governor,” Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) charged, but “of a radical governor.”

These are the same Republicans who privately mocked Evers as “Tony too nice” and who expected to roll over him after he was first elected in 2018. There was no honeymoon period for the new governor. Even before Evers took office the Republican legislature and departing GOP Gov. Scott Walker passed the “lame duck laws” to restrict the governor’s powers. For four years Republicans beat up on the governor every chance they got.

Now they were outraged that Evers played hardball in return. How dare he?

Republican legislators had tried their own trickery, linking income tax cuts for the middle and upper class in a way that made it impossible to veto only the tax cuts for the wealthy. But Evers calmly cut nearly the entire package, all but $175 million of the $3.5 billion Republican plan over the next two years, preserving only a small cut affecting lower-income payers.

Of course the GOP condemned him for this, and will try to attack Evers for not cutting taxes, but the governor’s message was simple: We still have $4 billion of the state surplus left, come back to me with a tax cut plan for the middle class, as my budget proposed, and we can pass that.

Evers knows that time is on his side. He has three-and-a-half years left in his term, the state Supreme Court will have a liberal majority as of August 1, and could require the gerrymandered Legislature to draw fair maps. Not to mention he has a far higher approval rating with voters than Republican legislative leaders, as polls have shown.

Evers’ most talked about partial-veto amended an education funding provision which lifted state-imposed limits on raising school revenues through 2024–25. By artfully reworking the numbers—crossing out the initial “20” and the hyphen—he extended the plan until 2425, for a total of 400 years.

That was one for the books. “We have no case law on the legality of a partial veto that would affect law spanning centuries,” as Rick Champagne, director of the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, told the press.

Of course, legislators can come back and change that provision in future legislation, but the cheeky audacity of the governor’s move brought him national and even international attention from the New York Times as well as the BBC.

The Nation called it “an epic win for public education,” while National Public Radio dubbed it a “pretty wild” decision. The governor managed to create rare agreement between the liberal online publication Salon, which labeled it a “bizarre veto” and the conservative Wall Street Journal, which declared it “the strangest veto of the year.”

All this attention and amazement came for a politician whom even Democrats were completely bored by when he announced he would run for governor in 2018. Evers was anything but a consensus choice and faced seven opponents in the Democratic primary. He was seen as an okay state Superintendent of Public Instruction who was a dull speaker and surely too mild-mannered to take tough stands against Walker.

But Evers turned out to be much more formidable than the experts in either party expected. He was good in the debates against Walker in 2018 and against Tim Michels in 2022. He easily projects a man-of-the-people aura, because that’s who he is. Nor is his niceness feigned, which is something that voters can sense. When Evers criticizes the other side, he sounds feisty, not nasty.

And that’s when we see a steeliness he rarely reveals: many liberals has urged him to veto the entire budget, but Evers quietly rejected that advice.  Yes, there was more money for choice schools, cuts to UW System funding and some other items in the budget liberals disliked, but the governor saw the chance to get more money for public schools, to win a historic increase in state shared revenue to local governments, an equally historic sales tax hike for the city and county of Milwaukee, raises for all state employees and more funding for transportation, workforce housing and PFAS contamination. He took all those gains and then, by cutting more than $3 billion from the Republican tax plan, preserved this money for the next budget go round, which might just come with a Legislature that’s added more Democrats.

All told, he issued 51 partial vetoes that were a repudiation not just of Republican ideology, but of Republican politics. He vetoed a $32 million cut to the UW System budget and a reduction of 188 positions aimed at eliminating programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion. He preserved Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming health care. And he vetoed a provision that would have funneled $10 million to Visit Milwaukee to spend on the 2024 Republican Convention. (The Legislature had allocated nothing for the planned 2020 Democratic convention in Milwaukee.)

Finally, Evers left Republicans as the bad guys on the sticky issue of sports subsidies. Evers won praise from the Milwaukee Brewers for a proposed deal to give them $290 million in funding for improvements to the team’s stadium. He left Republicans fuming for not being consulted, and they cut the provision from the budget.

Which leaves GOP legislators behind the eight-ball on an issue that bedevils politicians, as voters oppose sports subsidies, but get outraged if they lose a pro sports team. Republicans have left Evers winning praise from sports fans, but safe from attacks by voters who hate those subsidies. Chalk it up as another victory for too-nice Tony.