Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Frankenstein Veto (wikipedia.org)
177 points by Tomte on Feb 9, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 87 comments



As one user alludes to below, it did originate from an overuse of omnibus bills in the 1930s [1]. Here's something important to realize:

"Neither the framers of the 1930 amendment, nor the voters who ratified it, had any intention of creating a unilateral executive power to create laws that the legislature did not approve. Instead, they sought to ensure that each separate item that might become law as part of an appropriation bill would have the approval of the governor, in addition to that of the senate and the assembly. [2]"

And guess what? The Frankenstein veto doesn't exist anymore! It was removed in 2008 [3]. The Wikipedia article should more explicitly state that.

Note that line-item vetoing still exists widely across the US and is quite useful.

From an absurdist standpoint, I find the Frankenstein veto hilarious because it's, to use the term from the Wikipedia article, "quasi-legislating." You're not actually adding content to the bill, but you're changing the meaning! It's twisted and brilliant at the same time.

One commenter says "how can this possibly be legal?" Well, it's not anymore! But it did make for some clever and humorous legislating. Like, look at link [1] and find the picture half-way down with yellow highlights. You have to have a certain audacity to do that.

Also, I'm from Wisconsin and would love to see Jim Doyle fight the Bears at Lambeau. He probably would have wiped the floor with Cutler...

Sources:

[1] https://wiscontext.org/story-wisconsins-singular-partial-vet...

[2] https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Page...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03wisconsin.html


The Wikipedia page does address the 2008 amendment but says it doesn't fully remove the frankenstein veto:

> An amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution passed in 2008 sought to curb the practice even further, but its prohibition on "crossing out words and numbers to create a new sentence from two or more sentences" left intact the Governor's power to "cross out words within a sentence to change its meaning, remove individual digits to create new numbers or delete entire sentences from paragraphs." This loophole has allowed the practice to continue, albeit less frequently.


Eh, changing numbers or words to alter a particular sentence doesn't seem like a big issue. Certainly, there's a lot of power given to the governor, but that power is constrained by the words on the page. Now, if you write a bad sentence which still lets the governor change how the money is allocated, you're just a sloppy legislator. :)


> Eh, changing numbers or words to alter a particular sentence doesn't seem like a big issue. Certainly, there's a lot of power given to the governor, but that power is constrained by the words on the page. Now, if you write a bad sentence which still lets the governor change how the money is allocated, you're just a sloppy legislator. :)

Eh, alter a particular sentence seem like a big issue. power to the governor by the words on the page. money you're just sloppy.

^^ All of that are changing individual sentences of yours, read it now.


> Changing a particular sentence doesn't seem like a big issue. Certainly a power given to the governor. > Let the governor change money.

I'm sure Tony Evers appreciates your support for making him the judge in all criminal cases and allowing him to issue currency. (I'm sure he also agrees that only a bad sentence could be edited to imply an absurd non sequitur.)


changing numbers does seem like a big issue. there's a lot of power given to the governor. Now you change the money allocated.


Going to do the same thing as your other replies. This is fun:

>changing words to alter a particular sentence lets the governor legislat[e].


> Note that line-item vetoing still exists widely across the US and is quite useful.

Almost every other country on earth seems to get on fine without it.

It seems like a bizarre and trivially abusable power to me. Say a left-wing legislature passes a bill to make taxation more progressive, by decreasing the standard rate of tax, and adding an additional rate of tax for people earning over a million dollars a year. A right-wing governor can just line-item veto the second part, and turn it into a tax cut. So either the legislature simply won't pass such a bill, effectively silencing the voice of the people as expressed through their votes for legislators, or they will have to draft it in a cunning way to make it line-item-veto-proof, spending time and text, and reducing clarity, to overcome that obstacle.


Decided to look up what countries use line item vetos, amusingly the Wikipedia pages lists: Brazil, Panama, and three subsections about the US including during the civil war confederacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto


From a democratic perspective how exactly is having an executive be able to change a motion after it has passed a "good" thing


America was not intended to be a pure democracy.

The "checks and balances" of our government are really several different forms of government. We have the democracy of the public, the plebeian officers of the house, the aristocracy of the senate, the council of philosophers on the court, and the dictatorship of the executive.

None of this, however, argues in favor of giving the executive the authority to rewrite legislation. Even the much more mild line-item veto is an absurd workaround for a broken legislative process. If the legislature wants smaller, separable acts, it doesn't need to go crying to King Solomon.


Unfortunately, the legislative process may be inherently broken. The bar to pass legislation is 50%+1, and it's very hard to find any issue on which you can get a genuine majority entirely in isolation. What happens instead is that allies are made, and they agree to support each other: I'll vote for your thing if you'll vote for mine.

That's most effective when you can lump those votes into one, rather than two bills voted serially. That happens sometimes anyway, but some bills (especially budgets) contain thousands if items each of which is only of interest to a minority. That happens even without bad faith or earmarking. A bill to build a road between two states is most favored by those two states; a weapons system makes jobs where it's made, and the runner-up gets nothing. That's the ordinary give-and-take of trying to run a large country.

A line-item veto upsets the ability to do that... which seems appropriate when it runs off the rails, but also prevents legitimate business. I don't have a good solution to that problem, and I'd be very happy if King Solomon were to propose one. Running a country of hundreds of millions of people with diverse, and often competing, interests is hard even under the best of circumstances. And today, I believe, the circumstances are not best.


A similar argument applies to every other country most people recognize to be democratic, even more so to countries with an unelected legislative body like the UK. The checks and balances in the US are relatively strong but not unusually so, as far as I can tell, though bicameral state governments are a little unique.


It's a check against systemic entropy.


The Wisconsin legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered, so the "voice of the people" is limited. At least the governor is elected in a recognizable sense.


The governor is democratically elected too, so they also represent the voice of the people. They would presumably be predisposed to picking the part(s) of the bill that the majority actually wants, i.e. the tax cut.

Not being a fan of progressive taxation, I don't see your example as a bad outcome. If they want to raise taxes on some, pass it without the misdirection/"sweeteners" provided by tax cuts for others. That's not to say I'm a supporter of line-item veto overall. Though note that like all vetoes it can be overridden with a larger majority. So you're always only criticizing it on the basis of a slim majority not getting their way.


> The governor is democratically elected too, so they also represent the voice of the people. They would presumably be predisposed to picking the part(s) of the bill that the majority actually wants, i.e. the tax cut.

This just means that the legislature either won't pass the bill, or will pass a convoluted version that can't be line-item vetoed.

>So you're always only criticizing it on the basis of a slim majority not getting their way.

Presume that there is an election. Party A takes control of the governorship with 50.1% of the vote. Party B wins 65% of the seats in the legislature. The executive has the power to line-item veto any bill, and Party B cannot overrule the veto (presuming 2/3 majority is required), despite the slim majority Party A won the governorship by.


> Party A takes control of the governorship with 50.1% of the vote. Party B wins 65% of the seats in the legislature.

The implication being that the will of 65% of the electorate's is stymied by a weaker 50.1% of the electorate? You can't actually conclude that since roughly 15 percent appear to have voted both ways, making their will in this conflict ambiguous. Perhaps they support the gov they voted for so there's actually only a minority of the public who agrees with the legislature and their law. I say "roughly" because gimmicks such as gerrymandering, but these would not affect the governor vote.


The governor is a predominantly executive (not legislative) branch, and people know that when they elect a governor. What if a sysadmin could deploy half the API endpoints in a piece of software? Seems like a bad idea, right?

So called sweeteners are often necessary to create good policy. Often a policy will be overall good for a population but slightly bad for a large group of people (e.g. free trade). There needs to be a way to compensate those negatively affected (e.g. through reeducation programs). If a governor can selectively pass free trade but leave out the part of the deal that made it palatable, they completely change the law and screw over tons of people.

Oh, and progressive taxation is a great way to eat the rich. Fuck the state and fuck capital, we will destroy anything that stands in the way of democracy.


>The Wikipedia article should more explicitly state that.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. Wikipedia is publically editable :)


Imagining legislative text as if it were software code, this is akin to discovering that an engineer has been running a regex across pull requests which replaces 'if (safety-condition-encountered)' with 'if (false)' -- just prior to merge/deploy.

What would happen to that engineer and code review process in a well-run tech organization?

And why should we not apply the same principles to legal changes -- which affect our real world environment -- as we do for software changes which affect our application environments?


Politics isn't an engineering process, it's a knife fight carried out with pens.


"I saw him kill three men with a pencil. A fucking. Pencil."


Software systems are meant to be totally consistent, both for the sake of being able to execute deterministicly on dumb machines, and for reliable performance in relatively static or funneled environments.

Legal systems operate in constantly evolving environments and in thick, untransparent cases where the truth of the matter is typically unknown and needs are conflicting.

You might be able to do this kind of thing in limited settings of organizational design or corporate policy – but you will not be able to completely replace federal law with software.


Even in evolving environments, it's important to have terminology that describes what is acceptable and what is not in clear terms.

Writing precise language is hard, but ambiguity of language is worse, since it can lead to potentially unsafe interpretation.

The Frankenstein Veto makes it possible for state Governors to alter the meaning 'near runtime' - certainly post-review - and accidentally or intentionally create loopholes which enable damaging outcomes.


But laws are already not written ambiguously. They may be written with technical jargon which may be too specific or euphemistic, but that's not quite the same thing. What you would be advocating for at that point might a common language for law that avoids euphemism and keeps the reading level at a certain level of complexity, but doing so also limits the richness of language that we can use to describe legal agreements in the first place.

Furthermore any software system that could handle the Frankensetin Veto would have to be extremely competent in natural language and somehow do model checking on all the combinations of cases that natural language can cover. Not going to happen in polynomial time buddy. Not for all sorts of law anyway.

The problem that the Frankenstein Veto case demonstrates doesn't necessarily have to be handled in software either. It's a problem with the workflow of law, not the systems implementation.


I'm asking for simple language, accessible to a broad audience, which allows rules to be written so that most people applying them to a set of example situations would arrive at the same results.

Beyond that, what I'm suggesting is that it could be helpful to gradually make it easier for the public to view, comment on, and search proposed and historic legislative changes.

Collaboration, tracking down bugs and coaching/mentoring in open source software is greatly aided by tools like GitHub; it's worth having concerns about whether such a service itself should be proprietary, but I do think the value it creates is worth looking at.

If something similar could be created for legal texts, I think it's possible that there could be similar benefits. There may be risks, too.

My suggestion isn't that we should devise a software system to implement the rules of the Frankenstein Veto; instead my theory is that the time-to-detect and time-to-recover from a process problem like the Frankenstein Veto would both be shorter in the presence of an open, collaborative, transparent legislative repository.


No sorry legal /parliamentary systems do have to be consistent

A parliamentary/ legal system cannot have a motion saying A and have the executive turn around exactly do B


Read "Myth of the Rule of Law" by John Hasnas, who is a professor of law at Georgetown.

https://archive.org/stream/THEMYTHOFTHERULEOFLAWByJohnHasnas...

It is the nature of law to be a negotiation among parties, with all of the properties of negotation that this implies – personal interests, wavering agreement. Believing that law can carry an objective authority disguises this reality and leaving the nature of law unacknowledged makes regulation of that system more difficult.

You might argue that making law more formal or explicit can help here, but laws are already very formal and explicit, and being formal and explicit doesn't guarantee total consistency, maybe paraconsistency at best unless you're dealing with logics much less rich than those we can embed in natural language.


How does this apply to parliamentary procedure? my argument is you cant once a law has been agreed and suddenly say oh no I am going to rewrite the law on my personal say so.


You can come up with multiple conflicting interpretations during a case that are only resolved through further qualification and cases. This is a part of procedure as much as "personal say so" is not.


Are you saying the governor's boss should fire him, or if he refuses to do so, should be fired by the state's CEO? The problem with your suggestion is that Wisconsin is not in fact a dictatorship; there is no CEO with whom ultimate responsibility rests. Instead, the various constituencies who might otherwise be shooting each other in the streets have agreed to abide by a fixed set of rules, known as "laws". Clearly in this case the rules turned out to favor the governor more than was intended, but the option of simply ignoring them as a result has significant downsides.


The role of CEO is a good analogy with governor.

(There usually are layers of responsibility above both; the board for a CEO and the people for a governor)

If you look at it in those terms, I think it's more likely that they mean that voters would be well served by setting aside other interests and reforming the legislative process further (the article discusses various reforms) so that the governor is not able to take actions that are effectively unilateral, and also by not re-electing (or perhaps in the extreme, recalling) the governor.


> The role of CEO is a good analogy with governor.

No, a CEO is a dictator. In the US, the state governor is a significantly different role from a dictator.


In most corporations, the CEO takes direction from and serves at the leisure of the board (and if there isn't a board, there will typically be some other mechanism where the owners exert control). They typically have a broad mandate (which I suppose is what you are getting at), but they don't literally have unfettered control of the company.

(CEOs that own majority stakes in their companies get close to complete control, but that's not what you are arguing, that control flows from the ownership, not the executive position).


It sounds like you are confusing dictators with Dr. Manhattan.


I just give a lot of weight to "can trivially get away with murder".


I generally find that when people start drawing comparisons between government and corporations, they're probably doing to ignore at least one major difference in order to paint government in a bad light.

Not always, but usually.


> Imagining legislative text as if it were software code

As a software developer with a political science degree and some legal education, you basically shouldn't do this.

> this is akin to discovering that an engineer

Legislators and executives are even less like engineers in intended function than legal text is like software code.

Legislative text isn't software code.b ,


I'm also a swe with a polisci degree (but no legal education or qualifications). I think the comparison between policy and code is useful, but not perfect. Are there any specific areas that are different between them that we should pay mind to?


There's a lot, but a couple key points:

(1) Legal text is often (arguably, most often in the US system) intended to be reified in application and/or in subordinate enactments (e.g., regulation); not only is it not executable code, it's often not intended as a complete specification.

(2) executive and legislative authorities (at least, in the US system) are not like members of a single team, but by-design adversarial power centers. (They are more like customers with conflicting demands than engineers on a team.)


This reminds me of an idea I've had for a while.

In Poland, bills that amend laws are formed in a rigid way. They consist of a long list of recitals like:

"article such-and-such is amended to 'new text goes here'"

or

"after article 1.2.3, article 1.2.3a is hereby inserted with the following content: 'text goes here'"

(random example: http://prawo.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU2019000180...).

It has occurred to me that this kind of bills should be automatically parsable and convertible to a diff. Hence, a collection of amended acts should, in principle, be convertible to a Git repository.

The existing systems that cost heavy money probably already support something like this. But it still would be awesome to be able to do `git bisect` or `git log -S` on such a repo.


Check out this: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution It's not an official source, but they added the history with correct dates etc. Very cool concept!

Our student organisation (for CS students) also has our organisation statutes in git: https://github.com/abakus-ntnu/statutter


I'd be really interested in hearing from someone who thinks this is a good thing. How can this possibly be legal?


Venturing a guess: the goal was to allow line-item vetoes in omnibus-type bills so that the legislature can’t force the executive into accepting unwanted legislation alongside badly-needed and potentially unrelated legislation.


This is basically what happens with the budget every year in Canada. And we don't even have the "executive with veto power is the other party" issue because it's parliamentary.


We have no shortage of politicians promising to put an end to omnibus budget bills, though! Unfortunately they seem to forget about those promises once they get elected...


The problem is they're a simple answer to the problem of highly divided politics. Passing everything at once is the only guaranteed way to hold people across the isle to their word that voting yes on this bill they want will mean a yes on the thing you want. Instead vote on all the compromises at once.

In that way the line item veto is anathema to that. The legislature agreed to this bill allowing the governor to just cherry pick the parts they like breaks that down.


"How can this possibly be legal?"

I assume that every state mandates the separation of the legislature and the executive and this goes fundamentally against that principle. So the courts, the third branch here, have to be willing to overlook this problem. So these actions become formally legal through the general corruption of two of the three branches of government? How is this possible? Basically, enough people fine common interest in allowing what would normally be illegal actions.

Do some branches of government act illegally, immorally and self servingly? It is not entirely uncommon. All it takes is a self-serving coterie of people at the top. It goes away from embarrassment and/or some part of the cabal dropping out.

(I am not a constitutional lawyer)


There's a line of thinking that, if you can do a thing: "I can veto legislature", then you can do a weaker version of that thing: "I can veto a line or a word from legislature". Similarly, "I can fire a person for no reason" becomes 'weakened' to "I can fire a person for specific reason X".

I think Frankenstein Vetos demonstrates that that thinking is folly, but that's how the reasoning goes. And at least in the case of firings, we've recognized that, just because you can fire a person for no reason, doesn't mean that there can't be reason that would be illegal to fire them.


If you have the power to approve or reject a bill, then the power to approve, reject, OR ALTER the bill is a stronger power, not a weaker one. In this case, a vastly stronger one.


It turns out, yes, and that’s why these are illegal. But if you argue that vetoing a bill means vetoing every line of it, then vetoing almost every line is a weaker process—like “I can’t carry this whole pile up the stairs, so I’ll carry a few things up at a time” becomes “I can’t reject this whole bill, so I’ll reject just part of it”. But as we see, that argument doesn’t really hold up.


> How can this possibly be legal?

Well through a law allowing it, I'd imagine.

Also, they probably assumed people would be reasonable and would use it responsibly.


I have not yet found a good argument for the line-item veto; its purpose seems to be to be able to subvert the intent of a legislative body and extend the authority of the executive. But I'm open to hearing other opinions. I change my mind frequently enough.


Bills, at least in the US are often already a disaster of loading up a ton of often unrelated items.

The best argument I can muster is that it can be utilized to fight this.


That is pretty much the whole point of the argument. And the unrelated items aren't just noise, but themselves a kind of subversion of the democratic process where votes for a bill are "bought" with boondoggle projects and benefits specific to particular legislators and their districts. Presumably worse bills can get passed this way, versus if a bill had to get majority of votes on its own merits.


We need to invent the idea of well-formed bills, with requirements of clarity, factorability and maybe focus. This probably means we need a new branch of the judiciary to adjudicate whether bills and edits thereto are well-formed before they can be enacted. This would allow you to make a precise definition of a line-item, and therefore a line-item veto, without allowing monstrosities like in the article, among other benefits.

Edit: alternatively, just don't allow bills that do more than one thing.


It would be nice to have judicial review of all bills as they pass, for constitutionality as well.

Some would argue that it would slow down the legislative process. But looking at the sheer size of the US Code, I would argue that it's not at all a bad thing.


In my wilder moments, I argue for requiring the entire US code to be read aloud in Congress each year before they're allowed to pass new laws.


The Chinese Supreme Court can decide to send a law back to the legislature for clarification.


> don't allow bills that do more than one thing.

I'm afraid you'd probably need a constitutional amendment for that. And it might not be easier than the "getting money out of politics" one (https://wolf-pac.com/the_solution/).


Oh absolutely. Honestly it would probably be more effective to implement voting reform (single transferrable vote FTW) if you're going to the bother of a constitutional amendment.

As for your link, I can't even figure out what their proposed text is.


They actually used to have the text of an amendment. Now their website is more flashy but with less content. Too bad. It's about non-personhood of corporations and restrictions of corporate donation at the minimum, and at the maximum something like publicly-funded elections.


One bill one thing, would cure so much of what's currently wrong with government.


Strangely, the people that say this don't tend to hold out California as a model of government that the federal government should emulate, despite California actually having an enforced single subject rule.

In fact, they tend to accuse California of being worse than the federal government, but also at the specific things that they attribute to the lack of a single subject rule.


How do you define "one thing"?


It would probably be up to the courts to decide, and most states have this as a constitutional amendment. [1]

We do have a sort-of example to follow in the Byrd rule, which limits what can be done/attached to reconciliation bills specifically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_subject_amendment


I agree but don't know how do we can do this when the party in charge isn't interested in democracy.


Keep in mind that a political party is larger than any one person.

Both major parties in the US benefit from maintaining the status quo. Neither one wants to do anything that takes power away from Congress and puts it back in the hands of the people.

Whichever party is in power during any given cycle is the one that benefits from gerrymandering, omnibus bills, fillibusters, etc. So why would they change something that's useful for them?

Then when the pendulum swings to the other side of the aisle, the situation still holds true. Party A and Party B will fight each other to the death, but neither one wants a Party C to rise to prominence.


Reminds me of buffer overflow attacks that repurpose/rearrange existing source code in ways that the author never anticipated to gain control of the system



lol yes I'm working through reverse engineering CTFs now, and that's what I thought of as well. It seems like this means all your laws have to be super-convoluted to be robust against individual word deletion, maybe have checksums in logical expressions scattered throughout.

"I think I'll veto the 'not' here."

I don't know who thought this was a good idea.


Clearly, the solution is embedded checksums. ;)

"The following bill shall only be valid if it contains exactly 1,672 (one thousand, six hundred, and seventy-two) words."


"The following bill shall be valid" :)


It would be fun to use this for 'code injection,' specifying that the contents of an URL under your control should be included verbatim in the bill.


Taken from the "Top 10 signs the US is a totally nuts."

... and still not the topmost one!


This is really against the RAI if you ask me.


What's the RAI?


"Rules as intended", I think. The phrase seems to be used mostly in tabletop gaming.


Government is absurd.


This kind of thing is a bit crazy. It feels like it's related to shared history with the UK where some political procedure rules also cause clearly unintended outcomes. It would never happen in more pragmatic systems (think: Germany) because nobody would accept it.

I think it's based in a difference of legal philosophy, English law has always considered "exactly what is written down and nothing more" where some other systems tend to give weight to what is considered reasonable (with the ambiguity problems that comes with it) and the intent of the contract.


I mean, you can blame the Brits for shit like filibusters all you like. This, however, is Americas very own special sauce


> English law has always considered "exactly what is written down and nothing more" where some other systems tend to give weight to what is considered reasonable (with the ambiguity problems that comes with it) and the intent of the contract.

This isn't really a good description; English civil law leans on reasonableness a lot, and administrative law has "Wednesbury unreasonableness". And US constitutional law discussion goes on about the "intent of the founders" a lot.

No, the Frankenstein veto is a consequence of having a highly partisan system and multiple layers of government. So you can get situations where the govenor and the legislature are engaging in this kind of stupid warfare. I don't think that's actually possible in Germany? Possibly the powers and subsidiarity are distributed in more clearly defined ways in the (partly US-written!) federal constitution?


The US have a system where the president has the power to start a nuclear war. Consequently, the presidency is an supremely powerful office only one party can control at a time. This is a winner-takes-all system where the stable optimum is a two-party oligarchy.


The presidency is one branch of three in the US federal govt, each with supreme power in their particular roles. The primarily powers of the presidency relates to foreign policy, as opposed to the congress which writes the laws and controls the budget. So an example of a power regarding who controls military capabilities doesn't prove the president is supremely powerful in a discussion about writing laws. Unless you imagine the president will use the military domestically like Caesar to create a dictatorship (which people keep predicting for pretty much every single president, yet hasn't happened).


The authority to order a nuclear strike does not mean unilateral ability to cause it.

This power is almost irrelevant to the issues concerning the current "duopoly" right now.

Remember how no-one, not even the republican party, wanted Donald Trump to win, but somehow he did?


Yeah, this seems like one of the many absurd effects you get from the partisan environment of the US, similar to gerrymandering and strategic election of surpreme-court judges (who are supposed to be nonpartisan after all). I guess everything can be weaponized if politics is seen as a war and nothing else.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: