[Mb-civic] The Vexing Qualities of a Veto - George F. Will - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Vexing Qualities of a Veto

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A23

In spite of President Bush's almost unprecedented reluctance to use the 
veto power conferred by the Constitution -- on March 23, Bush will have 
served longer without issuing a veto than any president since Thomas 
Jefferson, who vetoed nothing in two full terms -- he says the nation 
needs, and implies that he would robustly use, a line-item veto power 
that Congress can and should give him. But both the "can" and the 
"should" are problematic.

The word "veto" is not in the Constitution. It says "every bill" passed 
by both houses of Congress must be "presented" to the president, who 
must sign "it" or return "it" to Congress. The antecedent of the pronoun 
is the entire bill, not bits of it. As President George Washington 
understood: "I must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto."

That did not matter then: The only appropriations bill passed by the 
First Congress in 1789 was just 142 words. Besides, early presidents, 
according to historian Forrest McDonald, considered appropriations 
"permissive, not mandatory," and effectively exercised a line-item veto, 
as when Jefferson refused to spend $50,000 for gunboats he deemed 
unnecessary.

Forty-three governors have, and many presidents have coveted, the power 
to veto line items. And the presidential veto power has been partially 
vitiated by big government -- by Congress's presenting presidents with 
11 elephantine appropriations bills that make vetoes messy.

In 1996 a Republican-controlled Congress gave President Bill Clinton the 
power to cancel items that Congress could repass in a stand-alone 
measure. If the president then rejected that, Congress had to muster 
two-thirds majorities in each house to override him. But in 1998 the 
Supreme Court frowned. It said canceling is indistinguishable from 
repealing, which is legislating -- writing, not executing laws.

Indeed, the 1996 act made the president the potentially dominant 
legislator, able to treat a bill as a cafeteria from which he could take 
whatever he liked. The Constitution does not empower Congress to yield 
its powers. And a perhaps insoluble and hence disqualifying problem with 
the line-item veto is this: Legislation, as truncated by a president 
using a line-item veto, might never have attracted a congressional majority.

Not only is the constitutionality of the line-item veto questionable, 
so, too, is the veto's utility as a restraint on spending. Arming 
presidents with a line-item veto might increase federal spending, for 
two reasons.

First, Josh Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, may 
be exactly wrong when he says the veto would be a "deterrent" because 
legislators would be reluctant to sponsor spending that was then singled 
out for a veto. It is at least as likely that, knowing the president can 
veto line items, legislators might feel even freer to pack them into 
legislation, thereby earning constituents' gratitude for at least trying 
to deliver.

Second, presidents would buy legislators' support on other large matters 
in exchange for not vetoing the legislators' favorite small items. 
During the two-year life of the line-item veto, Vice President Al Gore 
promised that Clinton would use the bargaining leverage it gave him to 
get legislators to increase welfare spending.

The line-item veto's primary effect might be political, and inimical to 
a core conservative value. It would aggravate an imbalance in our 
constitutional system that has been growing for seven decades: the 
expansion of executive power at the expense of the legislature. This 
ongoing development has been driven by wars hot and cold, and by 
today's, which is without a foreseeable end.

Time, and perhaps the Supreme Court, will tell whether the president's 
proposed line-item veto -- Congress would have 10 days to ratify or 
oppose his proposed cancellations -- passes constitutional muster. Sen. 
Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) thinks the president can unilaterally erase much 
"earmark" spending -- $52.1 billion in fiscal 2005 -- by directing 
executive branch officials to ignore spending that is ordered by 
congressional committee reports but is not included in the text of the 
actual appropriation bills.

In any case, about 62 cents of every dollar the federal government 
spends goes automatically to entitlements (54 cents) and debt service (8 
cents). An additional 21 cents is for defense and homeland security. The 
line-item veto concerns the remaining 17 cents. That is not trivial: 
Savings always come at the margin. As California's governor, Ronald 
Reagan used his line-item veto to cut an average of 2 percent from 
spending bills. The governor of Texas from 1995 through 2000 used his 
line-item veto on bills totaling $265.1 billion -- cutting just .043 
percent from those bills that he said reflected his state's conservatism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502177.html?nav=hcmodule
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