President Bush has a new proposal that he says will help control federal spending.
President Bush, seeking to curb ballooning federal spending, announced today he will propose a new law giving him a line-item veto, the authority to strike a specific item from a federal spending bill without killing the entire legislation.
“Forty-three governors have this line-item veto in their states,” Bush said at a morning ceremony to swear in Edward Lazear, the new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “Now it’s time to bring this important tool of fiscal discipline to Washington, D.C.”
In general, this is a good idea. President’s have been asking for the line-item veto for more than 20 years, and it arguably would bring back some discipline to the budgetary process. There’s only one problem with the law that President Bush proposes:
In a 6-3 decision in 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a law that had given President Bill Clinton a line-item veto. The justices ruled that the Constitution does not give a president that power and that the law violated a constitutional requirement that legislation be passed by both houses of Congress and presented in its entirety to the president for signature or veto.
Prior to this bone-headed effort by the Clinton Administration and Congressional Republicans, everyone assumed that the only way a President would be able to get a line-item veto would be if the Constitution were amended to provide for it. It turns out, as the Supreme Court affirmed, they were correct. So, what makes the Bush Administration think that the result this time would be any different ?
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said at the morning briefing that Bush’s proposal was unlike the Clinton-era veto because it involves the president canceling spending items before sending the bill back to Congress for another vote.
Sounds like word games an a gimmick to me. In the end, I would expect this proposed law to be struck down by the Supreme Court for the same reasons that Clinton-era law was almost 10 years ago — you simply can’t do things that way.
Of course, there is a certain irony in Bush talking about a line-item veto:
Bush has not exercised his veto power once since entering office, although he’s threatened to exercise it more than 130 times.
Yep, not a single veto in five years. Not even when he’s presented with legislation that he admits is unconstitutional. One wonders if he’d use the line-item veto if he did have it.
Technorati Tags: Bush, Politics, Federal Budget, Line Item Veto
