What a Governor Can Actually Do and What Only the Legislature Can

Every cycle, somebody running for governor stands in front of a flag and promises to abolish the property tax, fix the roads, fire the bureaucrats and bring back the factory, all before lunch on the first day. It sounds wonderful. It also sounds like a man promising to repaint a house he does not own, using paint he has not been given, with a crew somebody else hires.

Here's the thing about the governor's office: it is the most visible job in state government and, on paper, one of the most constrained. The governor's face is on the billboards, the signature is on the disaster declaration, and the blame lands on the governor's desk when a bridge closes. But the power to tax, the power to spend and the power to write the law sit mostly with the legislature and with the state constitution. If you want to hold a governor accountable, and you should, you need to know what the job really is. So let's go through it, power by power.

The governor is one officer among several

Start with a fact that surprises people who think of the governor as a small president. In many states, the governor does not even control the executive branch. Voters elect other statewide officers separately: the attorney general, the secretary of state, the treasurer or comptroller, sometimes the lieutenant governor, the agriculture commissioner, the land commissioner, the insurance commissioner. Those officials answer to the voters who elected them, not to the governor.

Texas is the classic example. The Texas Constitution of 1876 was written by people who had just lived through a government they did not trust, and they spread executive power around on purpose. The lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, land commissioner and agriculture commissioner are all elected statewide on their own tickets, and the Texas lieutenant governor presides over the state Senate, which gives that office a grip on the legislative calendar that many governors would envy. Lawyers call this a plural executive. A governor in such a state who tries to order the attorney general to drop or bring a case will find out quickly that the attorney general has a separate mandate and a separate set of voters.

Compare that with the federal model, where the Constitution vests "the executive Power" in a single President and the Cabinet answers to him. Most state constitutions took a different road. The reason is worth respecting even if you would design it differently: the founders of those state governments had learned to fear the appointed governors of the colonial era, and they carried that fear into their own constitutions.

The veto and the line-item veto

The veto is the governor's sharpest real tool. In nearly every state a bill does not become law until the governor signs it, lets it become law without a signature after a set number of days, or the legislature overrides a veto. The override threshold is usually two-thirds of each chamber. A few states set it lower, at three-fifths or even a simple majority, and that difference matters enormously for how much a veto is worth. Check your own constitution.

Then there is the line-item veto, which most states give their governors and the federal government does not. In those states a governor can strike individual items out of an appropriations bill and sign the rest. Congress tried to hand the President something like it in 1996, and in Clinton v. City of New York (1998) the Supreme Court held that the federal version violated the Constitution's procedures for making law. A state constitution, though, can grant the power cleanly, and most states have done it. In some states the veto reaches the amount of an item as well, so a governor can shave a number down instead of striking it.

Why should a conservative care? Because the line-item veto is a weapon against the oldest trick in the legislative book, the spending rider that nobody would vote for on its own. It is the difference between a governor who can say "I'll take the road money and leave the pet project" and one who has to swallow the whole thing or shut the government down. It is not a magic wand. Legislatures learn to write budgets that are hard to carve, and a governor who vetoes the favorite item of a powerful committee chair is going to meet that chair again in January. But it is a real power, and it is a power the federal government's chief executive does not have.

The budget: a governor proposes, the legislature disposes

In most states the governor proposes a budget and the legislature writes the one that actually passes. That sentence contains the entire gap between the campaign and the job.

The proposal matters. It sets the terms of the debate, signals priorities, and gives the governor's agency heads a number to defend. In states where the governor controls the budget office, he or she also controls the revenue estimate, and anybody who has watched a budget fight knows the revenue estimate is where half the war is won. But the legislature holds the appropriating power. In Texas, to take one example, the Legislative Budget Board, a body of legislative leaders, prepares its own budget recommendations alongside the governor's. The governor's proposal is advice with a nice cover.

So when a candidate promises to cut spending by some large number, ask the plain question: which bill, passed by whom? A governor can propose cuts, veto spending, and hold back on hiring in agencies he or she runs. A governor cannot rewrite the appropriations act alone. That is the legislature's job, and a governor who forgets it ends up writing angry press releases in March about a budget he or she could have shaped in January.

Appointments: the quiet power

If you want to see where a governor's influence really lives, look at the appointments. A governor typically names agency heads, board members, university trustees, and fills judicial vacancies in many states. Those appointments are how a governor turns a platform into a regulatory reality. A regulatory board that sets the rules for your occupation, a commission that decides how a state's water is divided, a transportation board that picks which road gets built first, all of these are the places where policy turns into pavement.

There are limits. In many states the state senate must confirm appointees. Terms can be staggered, so that a new governor inherits a board full of the last governor's picks for years. And the method of picking judges varies: some states elect them, some give the governor the pen, and some use a merit-selection commission that hands the governor a short list. The Seventeenth Amendment adds one more wrinkle at the federal level: when a U.S. Senate seat opens between elections, the amendment lets a state legislature authorize the governor to make a temporary appointment until an election can be held, and many states have done so. That is a power with national reach and it is a governor's call under a statute the legislature wrote.

Executive orders and emergencies

An executive order is the governor's way of directing the executive branch, and it is only as strong as the authority behind it. It can set policy inside the agencies the governor controls. It cannot repeal a statute, raise a tax, or create a program the legislature has not funded. That is the line, and courts in several states have enforced it.

Emergency powers are the gray zone. Most states give governors broad authority in a declared emergency under statutes the legislature passed, often written with hurricanes, floods and wildfires in mind. The trouble is that a statute written for a three-day hurricane gets stretched when the emergency lasts for months. The healthy conservative instinct here is to ask three questions: what statute grants the power, how long does the declaration last without the legislature's consent, and who can end it? We built a A Seven-Point Checklist for Judging Any Governor's Emergency Powers for exactly that, and it applies to governors of both parties.

Special sessions and the pardon pen

Legislatures meet for limited periods in many states, which brings us to the special session. In most states the governor can call the legislature back into session. In some, including Texas, only the governor can call a special session, and the governor alone sets the subjects the legislature may take up. That is an enormous agenda-setting power: it lets a governor put a single issue in front of lawmakers and keep everything else off the table. It does not, however, force lawmakers to pass anything. They can come, vote it down, and go home. The same fact explains why Why Texas Lawmakers Meet Only Every Other Year and Like It That Way is a real argument about power and not a trivia question.

The pardon power looks like pure governor, and in some states it is. In others, a board holds the power or controls the process. Texas is again a good example of the constraint: the governor cannot grant a pardon or commutation there without a favorable recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The governor can issue one thirty-day reprieve in a capital case, but not a pardon on his own say. Other states let the governor decide alone. The lesson is the same one running through this whole post. The title says "governor," but the constitution decides what the governor can do. For the federal version of the pardon question, see Pardon Power Questions Answered, From Washington to Ex parte Garland.

The National Guard, under state control

The governor is commander in chief of the state's National Guard when the Guard is serving under state authority. That is the force that answers floods, wildfires, and riots, and it is a power governors use more often than almost any other emergency tool.

It is also a power with a ceiling. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, and President Eisenhower responded by federalizing the Guard and sending in troops of the 101st Airborne to enforce the federal court's integration order. In Perpich v. Department of Defense (1990), the Supreme Court upheld the federal government's authority to order Guard units to training abroad over a governor's objection. A governor commands the Guard for the state's purposes, and Congress and the President can call it into federal service. That is the structure of the Constitution's militia clauses, and it explains why a governor's authority over troops is real and also limited.

What a governor cannot do

Put the list in one place, because it is the list you should keep on the refrigerator:

1. A governor cannot raise or cut a tax without the legislature. The power to tax belongs to lawmakers and, in states with limits, to voters.
2. A governor cannot pass a budget alone. The proposal is advice, the appropriation is law.
3. A governor cannot make a statute. Executive orders work only within the authority a statute or constitution grants.
4. A governor cannot overrule a state supreme court or the state constitution, and cannot overrule federal law where the Supremacy Clause applies.
5. A governor cannot fire another elected statewide officer.
6. A governor cannot make cities or counties do whatever he wants. Local authority depends on state law, and our look at Why Your City Can't Do That, Dillon's Rule and Home Rule Explained shows how much it varies.

Notice what is not on that list: a governor can still do an immense amount of good or harm inside those walls. The walls are the point. A governor who respects them is a governor you can trust with the pen.

The objection: a weak governor is just an excuse

Here is the strongest version of the other side's case. Voters elect governors, not legislative committees. If a governor can hide behind "the legislature wouldn't pass it," then accountability collapses, every failure becomes someone else's fault, and the executive becomes a ribbon-cutter. Some political scientists argue that stronger governors, with fuller budget control and clean appointment power, produce clearer responsibility and better government. And there is an old conservative argument, the one Alexander Hamilton made in Federalist No. 70, that energy in the executive is a defining characteristic of good government.

That argument has merit, and I'd accept most of it for the federal executive. But it does not fix the problem of the voter who is told one thing in October and gets another in March. The cure for that problem is not a bigger governor. It is a better-informed electorate. Voters who know the legislature writes the budget will hold their state senator and state representative accountable too, and in a healthy state that is exactly what happens. A governor who has to persuade a legislature has to build a coalition, and a governor who builds a coalition has to defend a bill in public. Frankly, I would rather watch that fight than watch an executive sign everything he wants on the first day.

The fair answer is that both things are true. Governors should be held responsible for what they actually control: the veto, the appointments, the agencies they run, the budget proposal, the emergency response. And lawmakers should be held responsible for what they actually control: the tax code and the appropriations. Our look at Three Imaginary States Show What a Trifecta Really Buys You shows how those two sets of powers interact when one party holds both.

Judge them against the real job

So how do you vote? Read the job description before you read the campaign flyer. Pull up your state constitution, which every state publishes online, and look at the executive article. Find out whether your governor has a line-item veto, how big the override margin is, whether the attorney general and treasurer are elected separately, who confirms appointees, and who can call a special session. The comparison in State Constitutions Versus the U.S. Constitution, Side by Side is a good place to start.

Then listen to the candidate's promises with that list in your hand. A candidate who says "I will veto any tax increase" is making a promise a governor can keep, and the threat is credible if the override margin is high. A candidate who says "I will abolish the income tax" needs a legislature, and you should ask which legislators will carry the bill. A candidate who says "I will fire the bureaucrats" should tell you which bureaucrats work for the governor and which work for an independently elected officer. These are not gotcha questions. They are the questions a job interview would ask.

The bottom line

• A governor holds real but limited power: the veto, the line-item veto in most states, appointments, the budget proposal, emergency authority, the power to call special sessions and command the state Guard.
• The legislature writes the tax code and passes the budget. A governor who promises to change either one alone is promising something outside the job.
• Read your state constitution's executive article. It tells you what your governor can do, how big an override margin is, and which statewide offices answer to voters, not to the governor.
• Hold both branches accountable: the governor for the veto and the agencies, the legislature for the taxes and the spending, and vote for the ones who respect the walls.