GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Outgoing Governor Scott Walker put pen to paper taking action on three extraordinary session bills on Friday at the State Office Building in Green Bay.
The three bills are now acts as the Governor gave his signature to authorize Senate Bills 883, 884, and 886, which include restrictions on early voting and many have claimed seriously restricts executive authority.
He repeatedly downplayed that narrative on Friday.
“Despite all the hype and hysteria out there, these bills do nothing to fundamentally diminish executive authority,” Governor Walker said. “The bottom line is the new governor will continue to be one of the most powerful chief executives in the country. This includes veto and line-item veto powers; appointing members of the cabinet and other government posts including judges, district attorneys, and sheriffs; broad executive order authority; administrative rule authority; issuing a state budget proposal; and more.
Those bills came out of a recent ‘lame duck’ session of the legislature.
The bill Walker signed would limit early voting to no more than two weeks before an election.
Walker had previously hinted at making some partial vetoes, but ultimately signed the three bills in the entirety.
The measures give Republicans control of the state jobs creation agency and block Governor-Elect Tony Evers from withdrawing Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit that challenges the Affordable Care Act.
They also prevent Evers from seeking to withdraw a federal waiver allowing the state to force Medicaid recipients to work to receive benefits.
A common thread out of Friday’s signing was Walker’s repeated assurance that the signed bills will not restrict executive authority to the extent that many critics have claimed it will.
“I look at the things here and I go beyond the headlines, beyond the editorials, and actually look substantially at what’s there, and the substance of what’s there doesn’t match the rhetoric we hear attacking it,” he says.
Walker spoke in front of a graphic board that highlighted the shared powers between his administration and the soon-to-be Evers administration.
“All the major executive authorities that I had [starting] January 3, 2011, remain intact,” he explains. “Again a lot of hysteria nationally, but it doesn’t fundamentally take away from it.”
He also addressed criticism regarding the fact that the bills are being signed towards the very end of his tenure.
“I don’t stop, even though the media treats an election as though that’s the end of a term, it’s not,” explains Walker. “I’m the governor of the state of Wisconsin until Tony Evers takes the oath of office on January 7 of 2019.”
Governor Walker also spoke briefly regarding his next step. He says he’s had plenty of opportunities to go to Washington, but he plans on remaining in Wisconsin with his family. He claims he wouldn’t sign anything that hurts the state going forward.
“I want Wisconsin to do well,” he explains. “I want Tony Evers to be successful, I want the legislature to be successful, I just want to make sure there’s a balance going forward.”
