2nd Test Set Over Nursing Homes; Senate Republicans Aim to Rebuff Doyle’s Fee-Raise Veto Tuesday

Madison Republican leaders in the state Senate plan a showdown Tuesday to determine whether that house will follow the Assembly’s lead by overriding Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s veto of higher fees for nursing homes that serve Medicaid patients.

Senate leaders scheduled their vote on Wednesday, the day after an Assembly meltdown on the issue. With two members absent and one Democrat inadvertently not voting, the Assembly just barely posted the two-thirds majority needed to send the veto override to the Senate.

Meanwhile, Assembly Republican leaders on Wednesday planned to force votes today on a handful of potential veto overrides on other health care issues votes whose outcomes were too close to call but could also embarrass Doyle, who was out of the state on a campaign fund-raising trip.

By scheduling a Tuesday override vote with the intent of restoring $15.2 million for nursing homes, Senate Republicans gave leaders of that industry a weekend to try to line up support of 22 senators, or two-thirds of the Senate.

If the Senate joins the Assembly in overriding Doyle, it would mark the first time in two decades that the Legislature has overturned a veto by a Wisconsin governor. Republicans hold a 19-14 majority in the Senate. A veto override attempt on a photo ID requirement for voters won the support of 21 senators this week, just one short of the number needed to force it into law over Doyle’s objection.

Senate Democratic Leader Judy Robson of Beloit said she was hopeful that Democrats would uphold Doyle’s veto. Many of them support a Democratic plan, which Doyle endorsed, to pay nursing homes more by tapping a budget reserve fund.

Touchy subject

The Assembly vote touched off a Capitol firestorm that still smoldered Wednesday.

The controversy started when Assembly leaders called for a vote on the nursing home fund override. At the time, Rep. Pedro Coln (D- Milwaukee) was in the parlor at the back of the chamber and didn’t hear the call to vote; he was recorded as having not voted.

With two members absent and Coln not voting, Republicans said they had the two-thirds majority necessary 64-32 to override the veto. Democrats demanded that Coln be allowed to cast a vote, but argued that the override failed because the majority needed 65 votes to override. Republicans wouldn’t allow another vote.

Lost in the drama over Coln’s uncast vote was the agreement by all parties, including Doyle and Democrats, that nursing homes deserved the increase in funding, said Tom Moore, executive director of the Wisconsin Health Care Association, which represents 190 nursing homes. Republican legislators and Doyle can’t agree on how to pay for the increase, however.

Tensions over Coln’s vote flared at the Joint Finance Committee meeting Wednesday, after Sen. Joe Leibham (R-Sheboygan) missed two votes but later was allowed to be recorded as having voted for two bills. That prompted Coln to cry foul.

Democrats aren’t giving up on the possibility of a rerun of the Tuesday vote, and they will ask for one when the Assembly convenes today, Assembly Minority Leader Jim Kreuser (D-Kenosha) said.

Republican leaders will be looking to move on. During the session, the Assembly is to take up a dozen bills not acted on Tuesday and four other veto override votes, including one on whether pharmacists should get more state aid for filling prescriptions for the poor, older residents and people with disabilities on Medicaid.

Amendment debated

Democrats have enough votes to uphold Doyle’s vetoes, Kreuser said, joking that this time, members might be ordered to stay in their seats.

The veto overrides gave special prominence to the proposed constitutional amendment on the governor’s veto power, which couldn’t become law until early 2007.

The Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security, Military Affairs, Small Business and Government Reform held a public hearing Wednesday on the amendment, which would limit the veto powers of future governors.

A sponsor, Sen. Sheila Harsdorf (R-River Falls), said the amendment would stop governors from deleting all but one word or two words in a paragraph of a budget bill, then doing the same with the following paragraphs, so that they write a new sentence. Under the change, governors could veto only whole sentences in a spending bill.

This summer, when he rewrote the Legislature’s budget with vetoes, Doyle used his broad authority to veto 732 words in successive paragraphs, and then cobbled the remaining words together to write an entirely new 20-word sentence, Harsdorf said. That new sentence moved $472 million from the transportation budget to school funding.

“This is not what was intended” when Wisconsin voters gave governors partial veto authority in the 1930s, Harsdorf said.

Under her proposal, Wisconsin’s governors would still have the broadest partial veto power in the nation, she added.

But state Administration Secretary Marc Marotta said that Wisconsin voters have come to expect governors to fix the political and partisan gimmicks that legislators add to state budgets, no matter who is governor. Courts have also repeatedly upheld the governor’s veto power.

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Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

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