“Governor, what have you done?”

Could you imagine this being done in Washington?

[Wisconsin] Gov. Jim Doyle used his veto pen Friday to carve up the Legislature’s budget-repair bill in a way that frustrated lawmakers but appeared to leave them unable to do anything about it.

Legislative leaders had pledged this week to try to override any vetoes that would allow Doyle to tap the state transportation fund. Yet on Friday, they did not appear to have the two-thirds majority required to do that, and it was not clear they would even hold a vote on the matter.

Doyle’s vetoes were the first since voters slightly limited his powers on April 1. Voters approved a constitutional change that ended the “Frankenstein veto” by saying that governors could not strike words from two or more sentences to make new sentences.

But the governor still may strike individual sentences or parts of sentences and erase individual digits and string numbers together in one sentence. On Friday, Doyle used the 2, 7 and 0 from a reference to the years 2007-’09 to order $270 million in spending cuts by July 1, 2009.

Those cuts were much deeper than the $69 million for which lawmakers called.

“We cannot address a $652 million gap with just $69 million in reductions,” Doyle said. “Through my vetoes, we will make meaningful cuts.”