Since 1930, Wisconsin’s constitution has allowed the Governor to veto appropriations bills “in whole or in part”: a phrase the Wisconsin Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the Governor can strike out individual words in a manner that produces strange results:

…Gov. Tony Evers struck a hyphen and “20” to change the end date for a $325 per-student spending increase from 2025 to 2425.

To quote a friend, “that’s so goofy hahahaha.”

While constitutional amendments in 1990 and 2008 have constrained this power to prohibit the striking and stringing together of individual letters within words and the creating of a new sentence by combining parts of two or more words across sentences, the Governor can still create policies never intended by the Legislature through a creative cobbling together of words within a sentence.

Here is the paper by Alyssa Reloy (2020) in the Wisconsin Law Review, charmingly titled “The Cheese Stands Alone” (link).

h/t: Judah

Readings

Oft Mistaken or The Most Agentic Young Man on The Internet Offers You Regular Writing. Judah has decided, seemingly in the middle of the night, to launch a new section of his newsletter that I will never fail to read. Few people in their early twenties can pitch me with ‘I need to practice my writing skills, how about you sign up to read the results.’ Generally, I would be wary of anyone telling me to read reams of foolscap filled with the musings of people in their early twenties. But then, if you read me, I am asking you to trust me, and therefore, to go read this post.

Bridget Fahey. I’ve been thoroughly obsessed with recent papers by Bridget Fahey on federalism. This includes Data Federalism in the Harvard Law Review and Federalism by Contract in the Yale Law Journal. Here’s an excerpt from Data Federalism:

We have largely neglected to theorize the reality that as the technologies of governance evolve, so too do the forms of power our governments give and get from one another. As data has become a significant source of power for governments, it has also become a source of intergovernmental currency, inducement, leverage, and coercion. Intergovernmental data markets thus show that the division of governmental power in our federalist system is doubly dynamic: Not only is the distribution of governmental power always changing, but so too are the forms of power governments use and exchange. This insight challenges and complicates federalism theory in multiple respects, suggesting that it is time to renew conversations about power and federalism.

Pew, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (2021). Between late 2019 and early 2020, Pew conducted “nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages” and asked them questions about religious freedom, diversity, pluralism, caste, national identity, practices, beliefs, clothing, and food. My favourite lollapalooza is the following image, from page seventeen, and I have adjusted some priors accordingly:

The Caravan. I’ve been reading some cover features from older issues of Caravan Magazine, and they are fantastically entertaining. I particularly like the profiles, and I’ll recommend: The Argumentative Indian about Kapil Sibal; and Talk of the Town, about Arun Jaitley.

OMB Circular A-4 (Regulatory Analysis). Peer reviewers for this draft included Cass Sunstein, so that tells you enough. “This Circular provides the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) guidance to Federal agencies on the development of regulatory analysis.” Here’s page three:

You will find that you cannot conduct a good regulatory analysis according to a formula. Conducting high-quality analysis requires competent professional judgment. Different regulations may call for different emphases in the analysis, depending on the nature and complexity of the regulatory issues and the sensitivity of the benefit and cost estimates to the key assumptions.

Here’s an update from nihalsahu.net, my personal website where I write longer essays that someone has yet to convince me to just post on my Substack.

Religious Freedom, Reform, and Secularism. This is an essay on ‘Indian secularism’, in a neat little 2.5k word vignette, that discusses the constitutional history and the practices of the Indian states. Here’s an excerpt:

And then Independence happened and the brand new Indian state was composed of territories taken from the Nizams of Hyderabad, the Maharaja of Kashmir, the Travancore royal family, and other rulers of princely states, all of which funded and owned large religious institutions, primarily temples. And the new Indian state slid comfortably into their shoes. You see, when you have a state machinery, and a new government takes over, you still need the machinery. We took over the civil service and the railways from the British, and we took over the funding of, and the ability to regulate religious institutions too. To offer one of many examples, this is why the Constitution (since the 1956 Amendment) contains Article 290A, which mandates funding to the tune of tens of lakhs from the consolidated funds of Tamil Nadu and Kerala to their temple boards. This is the Indian state honouring the commitments they took over from the Maharajas.

As Tyler Cowen would say: self-recommending!