Now for some governors, rejecting that many laws in a single legislative session might be considered excessive, or at least ambitious. For Johnson, it was more like a respite. Some years, he's vetoed more than 200.
Since his first election to the governorship as a Republican in 1994, the former construction executive has utilized his broad executive powers to nullify hundreds of bills passed by the state legislature. Long ones, short ones, pork-laden, pork-free--he's turned down all kinds. Johnson even vetoed a piece of legislation that his wife, the state's First Lady, testified in favor of. The bill would have waived college tuition for some youths in foster care.
Gary Johnson is an unusual governor in this respect, but it is largely a question of degree. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, a colleague of Johnson's from the huge GOP gubernatorial crop of 1994, broke a state record with 57 vetoes in his first year. Over six years, Keating has vetoed well over 200 measures, perhaps unremarkable by Johnson's standards but still more than sufficient to set a new mark for Oklahoma governors. With more than two years still left in his second term, Keating is poised to set a lifetime veto record that may never be broken.
Few governors can match Johnson and Keating in sheer veto volume, but many of them are making liberal use of the device these days. Governors all over the country seem to have gone a little veto-happy. From Alaska to Wyoming, Republicans, Democrats and independent governors are unsheathing their pens and raining red-ink on legislatures.
In his first year in office, in 1997, Washington Democrat Gary Locke set a state record by vetoing all or parts of 125 bills. A year later, New York Republican George Pataki bested him by nearly tenfold: He used his line-item veto authority to zero out more than 1,000 items from the state budget.
No one has repeated Pataki's stunning feat. But the past two years have been banner ones for the veto. In 1999, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura managed to infuriate legislators from both parties with a series of unexpected vetoes accompanied by a red pig stamp to signify them as pork. Oregon's John Kitzhaber, a physician, earned the nickname "Dr. No" for breaking an 88-year-old state veto record by turning down 69 bills. In Maine, Governor Angus King was more judicious with his veto pen, but with 22 vetoes in 1999, still managed to set a new record.
What's behind this outbreak of veto-mania? Experts on the governorship differ on what has caused it, and what to make of it. But one thing seems clear to everyone: The veto has never been more popular with governors than it is right now.
More than a decade ago, at a National Governors' Association seminar for newly elected chief executives, a veteran governor explained his veto philosophy to the rookies. "If you have to use the veto, you've failed," he told them, "The veto should be the shotgun behind the door."
Perhaps there is a governor somewhere still imparting that old- fashioned advice, but if so, few newcomers seem to be paying heed to it. Wherever one chooses to look, governors are attempting to stretch the limits of their authority, while legislators and interest groups fight with little success to rein it in. Often, it is left to the courts to resolve the dispute.
Although the rules of the veto game vary considerably from state to state, governors generally have several types of vetoes in their arsenal. The most obvious one is the option to reject a bill in its entirety. The line-item veto is more of a surgical strike--it enables a governor, for example, to reject funding for a project in an individual legislator's district. Then there is the amendatory veto, which conditions approval of a measure on recommended changes or rewording.
Between 1985 and 1992, according to one study, state supreme courts were called upon more than 25 times to resolve differing interpretations of state veto procedures. In 1991 and 1992 alone, 11 decisions were handed down. In recent years, courts in Alaska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Washington and Wyoming have all taken up questions related to the scope of veto authority.
An ongoing spat between Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer and his state's legislature is typical of the litigation. Back in 1997, shortly after the conclusion of a special session, Geringer used his line item--or "partial"--veto power to erase portions of a school finance bill. The legislature promptly sued, arguing that the state constitution limits the governor's line-item-veto authority to budget bills only. The state supreme court sided with Geringer, so lawmakers took another tack: The next year, they passed a resolution authorizing a constitutional amendment to limit the governor's veto power. Geringer vetoed that measure, too.
Hemmed in on both sides, the legislature decided this year to make an end run around the court and the governor. After passing a resolution to limit the governor's veto power by constitutional amendment, lawmakers sent the measure directly to the Secretary of State's office for placement on the fall ballot, rather than to the governor's desk, as is customary.
In response, Geringer filed his own lawsuit. Calling it "a lesson in civics," he charged that the legislative resolution was invalid because it had never been presented to him for his consideration. Since the proposed constitutional amendment is slated to be on this year's November ballot, the state supreme court has been asked to rule on the case by the end of the summer. "This is a case of the legislature versus the executive over the right to go to the people," says House Speaker Eli Bebout, who like Geringer is a Republican. "It's an institutional battle. We respectfully disagree."
You don't often hear that kind of talk in Oklahoma or New Mexico, mainly because the disagreement there can't really be characterized as respectful. Keating and Johnson don't like their legislatures, and the legislators don't much care for them. And neither side sees much reason to be tactful.
In both Santa Fe and Oklahoma City, there is a distinct partisan element to the discord. Simply put, staunchly Republican governors are attempting to dislodge entrenched Democratic government establishments. Keating and Johnson view their missions as little short of revolution. They share a similar philosophy of low taxes and small government, and an intense belief in using market forces to lift their respective states out of the statistical bottom ranks. The Democratic legislative majorities opposing them resist the idea that these governors have any kind of political mandate for the things they seek to do. Long-suffering GOP legislative minorities provide just enough votes to help the governors stave off attempts to override the vetoes.
Keating announced his intentions even before taking the oath of office. He promised aggressive use of his veto power to advance an economic development agenda that included tort law revision, tax cuts, school choice and a new criminal justice policy. At the end of his first veto-filled legislative session, when it became clear that legislators had a very different agenda, Keating gave notice that he wasn't prepared to give any ground. "The point is, I will be at the table," he said. "And I will have a pen in one hand and a hammer in the other."
Keating's pen-and-hammer approach failed to make for good executive- legislative relations. Before long, the governor and legislative leaders were at each other's throats, setting the tone for the rest of his time in office. The governor told one audience that the legislature was trying to keep Oklahoma "ignorant and poor." At the end of this year's legislative session, Senate President Pro Tempore Stratton Taylor fired back in equally incendiary terms.
"You know the end of the session is near," Taylor said, "when Governor Keating throws his annual temper tantrum about all the great ideas of his that haven't been enacted into law yet. What the Governor forgets is the legislature wasn't elected to rubber stamp every single idea that happens to pop into his head."
Johnson's approach in New Mexico has been perhaps a little less bellicose, but no less maddening to the legislature. He has vetoed Republican-backed bills, Democrat-backed bills and bills that have unanimously passed both houses. He eschews dealmaking and takes pride in causing relatively equal proportions of pain on each side of the aisle. While Keating's collection of vetoes has a clearly partisan flavor to it, Johnson is more ideological. He takes aim at limiting state government growth and spending, wherever he sees it coming from.
The first flurry of Johnson vetoes, in 1995, was chalked up in part to inexperience--a self-made millionaire, the governor had never held elective office before winning the statehouse. After that, when Johnson continued to reject measure after measure, Democrats began disparaging him as a disengaged obstructionist. Today, having managed to override him only once since he took office in 1995, Johnson's opponents are resigned to campaigning for a veto-proof Democratic majority. Republican legislators don't exactly love their veto-happy governor, but after years in the minority, they aren't ready to desert him yet, either.
"The GOP has taken some kind of blood oath not to override," says Democratic Representative Max Coll, chairman of the New Mexico House Appropriations Committee. "It's frustrating to work really hard to build a consensus on funding levels and things like that and then have the governor run them through the paper shredder. When he does these sneak attacks with the veto pen, it doesn't lead to good communications. It causes discord."
New Mexico and Oklahoma aren't the only places where split control of state government is giving rise to a spate of vetoes. If more governors seem to be bucking legislatures lately, it could be because more and more state capitals are divided between the parties. Both Maine and Minnesota are governed by independents without partisan allies in the legislature. Oregon's Kitzhaber and Alaska's Tony Knowles, both Democrats, face Republican-controlled legislative bodies with whom they agree on very little. In Massachusetts, an overwhelmingly Democratic House and Senate find it pretty much routine to override Republican Paul Cellucci's vetoes. In Tennessee, where GOP Governor Don Sundquist recently recorded the first-ever veto of a state budget, Democrats have narrow control over both the House and Senate. In June, both chambers voted to override the budget veto.
"There's something like 37 states where the governor is of a different party," says University of North Carolina political scientist Thad Beyle, a student of the governorship. "That may be part of what's going on here."
But it's fair to ask if there might not be something more to veto- mania than cutthroat partisan politics. Alan Rosenthal, of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, says that in the end, the most important element is still personal style. "You could have a George W. Bush situation in Texas where the governor works with the controlling party to get something done," Rosenthal says. "Or, like Gary Johnson, you may not believe in working with the legislature."
Whatever style a chief executive uses, there's no denying that the modern governorship, as an institution, is as powerful and commanding as it's ever been, even after several decades of legislative modernization and procedural reform. A majority of governors have control over development of the state budget. Despite the rise of term limits in the 1990s, virtually all governors are allowed to seek reelection, and 11 of them are free to serve an unlimited number of terms. And every governor now has some form of veto authority: North Carolina, the last state without a veto provision on the books, created one several years ago.
Those heightened institutional powers are accompanied by other political trends that tend to work in a governor's favor: term limits for legislators, the decline of political party organizations, and the rise of a media-based campaign system that a statewide public figure has the best opportunity to exploit. Exposure on radio and television has enabled governors such as King, Ventura and Johnson to ignore traditional statehouse protocol and take their case directly to the voters. That's a luxury that is rarely available to any legislator, even a powerful Senate president or House Speaker.
"My sense is that governors don't suffer for their vetoes," Rosenthal says. "They actually come out ahead because they look as if they are decisive, principled, in command. Plus, you are taking on an institution that's held in low public esteem. So the process suffers, but not the governor. Any governor could be as big an ass as they want and the legislature can't really do much about it."
