Lori Falce: Focus on beating opponents sets up bitter grudges, bigger battles

The crowing came quickly after a routine political back-and-forth turned into an unexpected upset with long implications.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers took a pen to the state’s budget, meant to govern spending over a two-year period. He signed the plan into law — but not without a little last-minute rewriting.

If you ever want to know the importance of punctuation, this is it. By judicious use of Wisconsin’s line-item veto, Evers took a $325 increase to education funding per student for two years and turned it into a 400-year green light.

How? The dates were for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. Evers left the first school year alone. When it came to the second, he vetoed the “20” and the hyphen, making the changes run through 2425.

It was clever. It wasn’t smart.

It was clever in the way a prankster is. Congratulations on working out a loophole that worked around the rules and changed one thing one time — albeit for centuries to come.

It wasn’t smart because it was all about winning and not about an overall plan for success — not for the Democratic Party, not for the state of Wisconsin and definitely not for the kids. Why? Because, if you think that finding a way to roll that back won’t be a focus for Republican leaders looking to wipe egg off their faces, you know nothing about politics.

But this is where looking to beat the opposition rather than govern has gotten us, regardless of party or state.

Government should always be an effort to make people’s lives better. Will that $325 increase do that? Maybe. But is it enough? Is it all the money Evers will ever want for education? It better be. Because that trick won’t work a second time. So, ultimately, will it help, or has it just painted a target on education funding?

Democrats need to stop celebrating this as a win because it isn’t one. It’s a failure of government in its most basic duty — to negotiate with those in the other branches of government and the other party and come to a consensus about what needs to be done.

Republicans, likewise, need to resolve not to own Evers in return but to do better in comparison.

Is that what the two sides will do? Not likely. We have been locked in a cycle of mudslinging, pot shots and victory laps for decades, with no end in sight.

Take Washington, where both parties know substantial changes need to be made to things such as how the Senate functions and how the U.S. Supreme Court is held accountable. But, while both sides will rail about the issues when they are in the minority, they don’t rush to make changes when they benefit from the problems.

You can’t govern with fairness and equity if part of your goal is making the other guy look stupid. Evers might have made a crafty move Wednesday, but it’s only a matter of time until his legislature hits him in the face with a prank of its own. And while that’s happening, no one is being helped.