November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Mr. Gordon addresses a major political subject, wasteful spending, in his post this morning, and suggests that the President of the United States ought to have a line-item veto to use on spending bills. He argues that a line-item veto would curb pork-barrel congressional appropriations, and that any party “willing to seize the issue . . . would do very well next November.” To quote Mr. Gordon, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional.” His post does not go very far into the history of the line-item veto, but we’ve actually seen this movie before and we know how it ends. In 1996 Congress granted the White House a line-item veto, only to see it struck down by a district court, and then, in June of 1998, by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. As John Paul Stevens observed in his decision, the Constitution explains how bills become law and how the President can veto them, and it’s quite obvious that the line-item veto isn’t part of the plan. Any politician who wants to enact a line-item veto, therefore, must be prepared to amend the Constitution, not just pass a bill. Constitutional obstacles aside, is the line-item veto a good idea? I have serious doubts. Despite Mr. Gordon’s faith in the President as “the only [official] without parochial interests,” and his rather strange assertion that the President is “the only one who looks at the budget . . . as a whole,” I am not so sure that this enhancement of presidential power would not alter the political process in an adverse way. Right now, the President’s more limited veto is an essential mechanism of our balanced government. On the one hand, under this system, Congress must consider the President’s preferences before passing legislation in order to avoid provoking a veto. On the other hand, legislators can also force the President to compromise with their priorities. Members of Congress can effectively override the President’s preferences by passing bills that combine initiatives he dislikes with initiatives he judges essential. If the President wants to get his, he has to make sure Congress gets theirs. It is clear that there are problems with this system, and Mr. Gordon outlines some of them, but it is equally clear that amending it with a line-item veto would rather dramatically enhance the President’s power in relation to that of Congress. Mr. Gordon is pretty comfortable labeling congressional spending “corruption,” but the overwhelming majority of legislative appropriations are perfectly legal, if often undesirable. Perhaps these appropriations are so out-of-control that it would be worth expanding the Presidency in order to restrict them. But I would be uneasy about the unintended consequences of such an act. One last note: As I quoted above, Mr. Gordon suggests that the line-item veto could be a powerful element of a reformist political platform, and that any party that supports it could reap benefits at the polls. Consider, though, that President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply. But their party got wiped out in the midterm elections that year. Right now, the leading Republican candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, is also the man who initiated the lawsuit that ultimately stripped Bill Clinton of his line-item veto. If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.
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