Posted on 04/04/2006 4:40:47 PM PDT by RWR8189
In the next couple of weeks, the Senate Budget Committee will consider President Bush's proposal for presidential line-item veto authority. Despite concerns about investing the executive with too much power, this proposal deserves the full support of anyone committed to limited government.
The irony of the debate among conservatives about the line-item veto is that in 1996 a Republican Congress gave this power to Democrat Bill Clinton. Although there was some conservative disquiet at the time over executive authority, most Republicans believed the line-item veto to be a necessary tool to address the explosion in wasteful federal spending.
Unfortunately, in 1998 the Supreme Court ruled the line-item veto power unconstitutional. The 1996 line-item veto had authorized the president to simply cancel individual items he disliked in legislation. The Supreme Court mistakenly held that to be akin to legislating, a power the Constitution vests with the legislative branch and which that branch is not empowered to provide to the president. But the ruling wasn't unanimous.
Justice Antonin Scalia, whose opinions conservatives usually support, wrote in dissent, "Insofar as the degree of political, 'law-making' power conferred upon the executive is concerned, there is not a dime's worth of difference between Congress' authorizing the president to cancel a spending item, and Congress' authorizing money to be spent on a particular item at the president's discretion. And the latter has been done since the founding of the nation."
Even with Scalia's sound reasoning, and two new conservative justices on the court, it is unclear if the decision in Clinton v. City of New York could be overturned. So the Bush administration crafted a more modest line-item veto to address the Supreme Court's concerns while still giving the president the authority to veto wasteful spending.
Under the President's proposal, when Congress passes an appropriations bill, rather than canceling pork-barrel spending projects, a president would suggest rescissions of selected projects to Congress and there would be a timely up-or-down vote on his suggestions. The vote would require a simple majority in Congress to publicly reaffirm their support for these individual items. Because Congress would retain the final say, conservatives' fear about excessive executive power is unfounded. In fact, a modestly more powerful executive may be a necessary balance against a Congress that, for at least the last decade, has set the spending agenda with mostly disastrous results.
For a brief period in the mid-1990s, the commitment of Congress' Republican majority to limited government forced a popular Democrat president to accept spending cuts he didn't like. Since abandoning that commitment, GOP Congresses have passed more spending than the president proposed every year since 1996.
It is true that President Bush hasn't used existing presidential veto power to check Congress. But the problems associated with doing so actually argues more for, than against, a new, more wieldy tool.
Ironically, huge government spending makes the traditional veto harder to deploy. The standard appropriations bills have become so large, mixed with both pork and priorities, that an all-or-nothing veto is politically problematic. But Congress increasingly forgoes those for even larger omnibus spending bills, which have grown like fiscal kudzu in the last decade, and which are even less susceptible to being vetoed.
Some concern has been raised that the line-item veto might have an unintended side-effect: knowing the president may target their projects, senators and members of Congress will add budget items to at least get credit from constituents. But these days it seems the sun rising in the east is enough to encourage congressional profligacy. At least with a line-item veto, the president would have another tool with which to fight back if he were so inclined.
Giving presidents a more effective, if modest, check on runaway federal spending is constitutional, consistent with the primary conservative value of limited government, and in the best interest of taxpayers. Conservatives can be comfortable with the line-item veto.
Republicans are doing by spending what Democrats do by taxing.
Congress cannit legitimately cede its legislative authority, not to the judiciary and not to the executive. Any member of Congress who can't handle the responsibility of the legislative power should step down.
"Congress cannit legitimately cede its legislative authority, not to the judiciary and not to the executive. Any member of Congress who can't handle the responsibility of the legislative power should step down."
One might argue that in repeatedly passing these palpably unConstitutional omnibus spending bills they cannot have read, the proof is already there that the vast majority of Congressmen cannot handle the responsibility.
I think we're long past arguing that and into assumption territory.
"I think we're long past arguing that and into assumption territory."
LOL. I will posit it as a maxim in the future.
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