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Just a couple years ago when Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker first ran for Governor, he attacked Governor Doyle for his use of the veto pen. On his campaign blog Walker wrote an item entitled “Veto Power” (8/6/05). In it he criticized Doyle for the use of what has been called a Frankenstein Veto (bringing together words from two or more sentences to create new passages). He further said that he thought this use of the veto was illegal. He even went so far as to ask state legislators to take legal action against the Governor. Given all of this bellyaching over Doyle’s vetoes in 2005, what does it say about Walker that he seems to be going even further as a county executive in 2008?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported that in vetoing items in the county budget that Walker took this “creative” use to new heights. He largely bypassed the so-called Frankenstein Veto for the much more extreme “Vanna White” version. He did that by using random letters and even spaces from paragraphs to create entirely new meanings in the 2009 budget text. At one point he reworked two full pages of text by taking out letters and spaces simply to create the phrase: “restore contract funds.”
In 2005 Walker called Doyle’s use of the veto “bad policy” and “illegal”, so I have to wonder how he would describe his own Vanna White ways now. It is also strange to hear the stone cold silence on the right concerning Walker’s vetoes, when they regularly froth at the mouth at even the hint of Governor Doyle exercising his veto power.
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