Tuesday, February 17, 1998

Nixing the line-item veto

Judge Thomas F. Hogan may be right as a matter of strict interpretation of the Constitution, and if so, the U.S. Supreme Court should uphold his denial of President Clinton's authority to veto line items in spending and taxing bills.

But common sense tells you that the federal judge muffed things up in his ruling, even if he did cite great writers and such patriots as George Washington in arriving at his conclusion in federal court the other day.

Hogan's argument is that the line item veto violates procedures outlined in the Constitution. According to him, the president must either veto an entire bill that has been passed by Congress or allow it to become law. Anything else, he says, upsets the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches.

The fact is, however, that Congress delegated this power to the president and can take it back again anytime it chooses by a simple majority vote. A more far-reaching infringement of the legislative branch's right to shape legislation has been going on for years, namely, the way in which departments and agencies promulgate endless rules spelling out the specific intent of broad, vague laws. The precedent would appear ample, then, for Congress to hand over some portion of its duties to another branch of government, as long as those duties aren't nabbed without congressional permission.

It's true, as Hogan argues, that George Washington would not have liked the presidential power to veto individual spending items in bills. But neither would Washington have liked the modern age's omnibus bills that are weighted down, it has often been noted, with more ornaments than a fancy Christmas tree bears. Inevitably, those bills include waste, usually in the form of political pork, which is why politicians of both parties, but principally Republicans, have been calling for the line-item veto for decades.

The savings from line-item vetoes will never be astronomical in federal terms, but some millions saved here and some millions saved there amount to money that can be used for other, better purposes. The line-item veto makes government - taken as a whole - more responsible, and we hope it stands unless it is well-demonstrated that Congress cannot give away what the Constitution has conferred upon it.