The AJR6
resolution, which passed the state assembly last fall, will call on voters this November to decide whether the governor can accept federal funds without the legislature’s approval.
The resolution will add two questions to the ballot
— each focused on a proposed amendment to the state constitution. The first will propose adding language to the state constitution that would prohibit the legislature from “delegating” its powers over state financial appropriations and spending.
The second question will ask voters to decide whether to “prohibit the governor from allocating any federal moneys the governor accepts on behalf of the state without the approval of the legislature.”
The resolution’s Republican sponsors cast it as a return to proper separation of powers.
“For much of Wisconsin’s early history, lawmakers had the final say over the spending of all funds in the state treasury, no matter their source,” state Sen. Howard Marklein (R) said in January testimony in support of the bill.
“However, legislators abandoned that important responsibility during the 1930s and 1940s as federal dollars began to compose a much larger share of state spending,” Marklein added.
Hidden behind this neutral language is Wisconsin’s bare-knuckle partisan politics, which pit a Republican-controlled state legislature against Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — as well as the Biden administration.
Wisconsin Republicans have opposed federal climate plans since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. That year, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R) derided the bill as “Orwellian” and predicted that this so-called
“Green Energy Fantasy” would raise energy costs rather than reducing them.
Environmental nonprofit Evergreen Action cast the referendum as an attempt to stop the governor from rolling out renewable energy
— a transition that nearly three-quarters of state voters support, according to a survey from Data for Progress.
Courtney Bourgoin, a spokesperson for Evergreen, accused GOP lawmakers on Tuesday of trying “to undermine Wisconsin jobs and regional economic competitiveness to try to score cheap political points.”
“Wisconsin Republicans in the legislature have proven that they’d rather see clean energy jobs in Michigan and Minnesota than in the Badger State,” Bourgoin added.
But the impetus behind the proposed amendment goes well beyond clean energy. The resolution passed the State Assembly last year, buoyed by Republican anger about the governor’s use of federal stimulus money during the coronavirus pandemic.
The governor made those decisions “largely on his own,”
the Wisconsin Examiner reported at the time.
That money predominantly funded emergency grant initiatives focused on aid to children and businesses, according to the Examiner.
State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D) told the Examiner last year that the legislature couldn’t act quickly enough to use federal funds in the best way.
If the proposed amendment had been in place during the pandemic, she said, lawmakers would have needed to return to session and expedite relevant legislation — in order to ensure “that people in the state came through strong.”
“On the other end of a worldwide pandemic, we wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Sinicki added.
