From: PA146008@utkvm1.utk.edu (David Veal)
Subject: Re: Argument for broadening the veto power (Re: Who's weakening the constitution?)
Organization: The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 02:46:19 GMT

In article <1992Dec15.091356.3890@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
wchen@beirut.berkeley.edu (William Chen) writes:

>I've seen plenty of discussion about how a line item veto would be
>unconstitutional and furthermore would give the president too much power.
>Although we may need to have an amendment, I disagree that this gives him
>any more power that he already has.  As one poster suggested, he really
>can't add anything extra to the bill, he can only approve what Congress
>has already passed.

        I think the greatest concern, and the greatest danger, is that
the President could use the line-item veto in as a scalpel to remove
pork, but only to remove the other party's pork.  Tennessee's governor
doesn't have a line-item veto, so I don't know how this problem is dealt
with in states that do.

>From the comments of some people you'd think we're giving him the power
>to write new laws or something.

       Constitutional or not the President already has the power to write
his own laws, if Congress decides to not call him on it.

>Come on people, you know darn well
>that Congress oversteps their bounds when they send the President two
>completely unrelated things (or 2 hundred) and asks him to either
>approve the whole thing or leave it. This has gone far enough,
>and we surely need the line item veto.

        I don't think there is any question that Congress can go to far
when it does silly things like add military appropriations or local bridge
projects to environmental bills.  I think the question, though, is the
problem bad enough to require giving the President more power.  And it
would give him more power.

>Of course if Congressmen have any brains at all (some might) they will start
>tacking pork on the same line item.  Imagine tacking to a random sentence
>on a bill about education the phrase "and Congress appropriates one billion
>dollars to the Byrd Porkfest Foundation of West Virginia..."  Now clearly
>the President should be able to just mark out that clause, right?  Now,
>probably many of you could come up with a more subtle way of tying pork
>so that it appears on the same "line-item" as something the President
>needs crucially, but I give that just as an example.

        You can't write anything that can't be abused.

>That's why in order for the veto to work the President needs to be given
>a bit more leverage, otherwise his veto an item would be about as meaningful
>as his power to veto an entire bill is today.  I propose that the President
>be allowed to strike individual phrases and words.

      <Gag>  <Cough>  <Gasp!>

>Of course this would
>not be giving him too much power, because after all, Congress still can
>override him by voting separately on each line, phrase, or word by a 2/3
>majority, just as in a regular veto (or maybe even a 3/5 or 1/2 majority for
>the first few years to try the thing out.)

       In the first place, you don't "try on" a Constitutional amendment for
a few years like you try on a pair of shoes.  In the second, I *really* don't
like the ideo of the President being able to strike "nots" and "everyone,
buts" from bills, and then requiring the Congress to override it with a 2/3
majority.  That's crazy.  The idea was to allow the President to stomp on
anything absurd that wound its way out of Congress, not to allw him to play
word games as he did so.

>Now some folks may wonder why the President needs such leverage to delete
>individual words.  Let me give a hypothetical example.  Suppose Congress
>passes a law saying "Private businesses shall not be allowed to drill
>on protected wildlife refuges." Now suppose the President knows it's
>in the nation's best interest to allow drilling in those refuges.
>Now it would be a shame if he had to veto the whole sentence, since he
>agrees with it except one small word -- "not."  We can also argue that this
>was the real intent of the bill and that the word "not" was simply tacked
>on to the bill in some subcommitee by some loony environmentalist.

        Somehow I think that a "not" would be noticed as it went to a
vote by the whole of both houses.

> Most
>Congresspeople voting on the bill probably did not even realize that this
>word was tacked on--you have to read really carefully to realize this.

       All of *my* Congresscritters (Gore, Sasser, and Duncan) were, to the
best of my knowledge, aware enough to notice a 180 degree turn in such a
bill, if only to better line their pockets.  If most of them are that clueless,
I do not think that the line-item veto should be the top of our dicussion
list.

>Ok so under my proposal the bill without the word "not" would become law
>and if Congress really meant to have it in there they can just vote it
>in with a 2/3 majority.

        Congress is not a single entity.  Congress is two houses made up of
a lot of little Congresspeople with their own state, local, and party agendas.
"Congress" may very well have wanted to pass something, but the minority party
didn't want to go along, but didn't have enough votes to kill it.

>If they can't get a 2/3 majority for the clause
>then they didn't really mean it, now did they?

        That's the whole idea behind the veto in the first place.  The problem
with your line-item veto is that it isn't a question of whether the Congress
"meant" something, but whether Congress really meant what the President
cut and pasted the bill to look like.
        With even a small bill you've probably got enough words to make
something say anything you want by cutting out the intervening words and
punctuation marks.  And now the President can make anything he wants law
as long as he can get a minority of either house (it would only take a
few Senators) who would probably just go along to annoy the majority.

>Certainly some very clever individual could conjure up cases in which the
>President could abuse this, but we'll have to assume that the President
>has enough integrity not to do this.
>
>Ok people what do you think of my proposal?

         I think your whole message *must* be a joke by that last line about
integrity.   If you believe that, you probably think Nixon was framed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Veal     Division of Continuing Education Information Services Group
               University of Tennessee, Knoxville
               PA146008@utkvm1.utk.edu
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