Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Presidential Line-Item Veto Power
From: thong@husc10.harvard.edu (Theodore Hong)
Date: 24 Jul 92 20:18:39 GMT

hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phillip M. Hallam-Baker) writes:
>In article <1992Jul24.054130.13285@news.iastate.edu>,
>barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
>|>   If there is any possibility at all that the President might have
>|>[line-item veto] power,
>|>I would like Bush to test it.  A lot of bills go through Congress that
>|>are
>|>good overall, but have tiny rider amendments that make the bills
>|>unsignable.
>|>Similar tactics by Democrats include passing legislation that includes
>|>most, 
>|>but not all, of the wishes of the President along with points (such as
>|>major
>|>tax increases) that make such bills similarly unsignable.   A lot of
>|>the waste
>|>in our government is from pork that originates in this manner.

>A line item veto would give the President absolute power.  Not just over
>the budget but over every piece of legislation.

>Also what happens if a bill had a clauses removed, would the bill have
>to go back to the Senate & House first, would they then get the chance
>to scrap the whole thing?

>Consider the following scenario, Congress decide to pass a law
>reorganising welfare benefits. The bill has a set of clauses which
>terminate the old provisions and then a second set to create new ones. A
>deranged President can then decide either to abolish welfare benefits
>entirely or to double them !

A simple way to avoid this is to allow line-item veto overrides, just as we
now have regular veto overrides.  For this nightmare scenario, there should
be no problem getting enough votes to override.

>|>   IMO, the perfect way to test this would be for President Bush to
>|>wait until
>|>a backlog a legislation accumulates on his desk that includes a lot of
>|>pork-
>|>barrel rider amendments and similar attachments, and line-item veto
>|>the whole
>|>misbegotten mess, removing the waste and passing on the parts that are
>|>|>beneficial for the nation as a whole.  In this time when the public
>|>just

>And generaly behave like absolute dictator. If you didn't want the pork
>barrel, you shouldn't have voted the clowns into congress and senate in
>the first place.

Well, the idea is that such things are typically added on in the middle of
the night onto massive or urgently-needed bills.  Riders on budget bills are
a good example, since they are needed by a certain deadline, and it takes
such a massive effort just to get it to the President that it's unfeasible
to veto the whole thing because of a few riders.

The major point is that pork-barrel attachments are kept well hidden.  A
line-item veto would force such things to be brought to a direct public
vote on their own merits.  As it stands, part of the "system" for passing
legislation in Congress is trading around favors for votes.  If you don't
go along, most of the time you can't get your bills passed.  (Although 
admittedly there are a large number of Congressmen who are just pork barrel
clowns).  Increased public exposure of pork-barrel riders will help
destroy this system.


Theo Hong
thong@husc.harvard.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc