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I realize that this makes me an apostate in certain conservative circles, but I don’t like the line-item veto and am glad that it was found to violate the U.S. Constitution when applied at the federal level. (And the case was correctly decided, BTW, given that when Congress passes a bill the president may sign “it” or veto “it” (or pocket it and let the whole thing either become law or be vetoed depending on whether or not Congress has adjourned).)

Let’s say that Congress includes in the budget $10 million for a pilot program of abstinence-only sex education and $10 million for a sex-education program that includes discussion of contraception. With a line-item veto, Obama could strike out the abstinence-only program but sign the other sex-ed program that only was agreed to as a compromise. And now imagine if Obama could strip out all spending on border enforcement (but keep welfare payments) and line-item-veto aid to Israel’s military (but approve smaller amounts of “humanitarian” aid to the Palestinian Authority. The compromises forged by each house of Congress in the legislative process would be gone, substituted by the biases, whims and caprices of the president (who rarely will be someone like Coolidge or Reagan). And I believe that the same principles hold true when considering a state’s line-item veto.

True, a line-item veto could result in lower spending to the extent that a president (or givernor) would have signed the bill had it not been available but now can eliminate some line items. But it sometimes will be the case where a president or governor would have vetoed the whole kit and caboodle had the line-item veto not been available, but he takes the easy way out by just vetoing a few of the more distasteful items. And since legislatures know that the executive has a line-item veto, they will tend to approve higher budgets and pass the buck to the executive instead of ensuring that the budget is as trimmed as possible. And even if none of this is true and Congress passed the exact same budget that it would have anyhow, if you’ve got a $3.8 trillion budget, the fact that Obama could reduce it by, say, $100 billion by vetoing conservative projects will do very little to get deficits under control.

So I don’t think that a line-item veto is a good idea, and instead think that executives should exercise their constitutional authority by threatening to veto bills that don’t meet his approval, and vetoing them if the passed bills don’t meet his criteria.