Mr. Bush and the Line-Item Veto

I woke up this morning, rolled over and turned on the (National Public) radio. One of the stories made my eyes pop open and my stomach start to churn. The news? Our illustrious president is chugging toward accomplishment of an objective he mentioned in the State of the Union: “Asking” Congress to give him the line-item veto.

What? Mr. Bush hasn’t assumed enough power during his reign? He now wants his sycophantic Republican Congress to confer more power upon him? Well, at least, this time, he’s “asking….” Asking NOW, of course, because he would like to get it out of the way before the mid-term elections have a deleterious effect on the GOP’s stranglehold on Congress. It will be interesting to see how fast the Wheels of the Legislature can be made to turn on this one. Anybody know where the fast-forward button is?

But wait—wouldn’t a line-item veto be a good thing? Wouldn’t it be a great way for the President to keep Congress honest? To effectively end the detestable practice of attaching non-related pork-barrel provisions to otherwise vital legislation? To control run-away federal spending on things like…bridges to nowhere? Sure it would…and if you believe that, I have some prime real estate in Death Valley that you’ll be interested in…

There was a time, back in the olden days, when I believed the President was the benevolent, patriarchal leader of our country…the one who always, always had the best interests of the people at heart. Okay…I was in grade school back then (the early sixties), and even our 45-year-old Chief Executive looked patriarchal to me. Starting from that tender age, the layers of glory I had built around the Office fell by the wayside one by one. First, I realized that presidents were mortal (Mr. Kennedy.). Then I realized that presidents made mistakes (Mr. Nixon.). I found out that good men were not always good presidents (Mr. Carter.) I learned that presidents were not always smart (Mr. Reagan.) By the time the current occupant obtained the office, the reality of the presidency had become pretty clear to me: the President is, first and foremost, a politician. That’s how he obtains the office…that’s how he retains it. Any nobler qualities possessed by the occupant of the Oval Office are purely coincidental. George W. Bush has been the ultimate embodiment of that reality.

So, let’s take a Chief Executive who has indisputably demonstrated how much damage can be wrought by a politically powerful president with a self-serving agenda, and hand him the power to strike from legislation passed by Congress any item that does not advance that agenda. Let’s hand this oil-rich, wealth-addicted, business-backed, bought and paid for Commander-in-Chief the power to make sure every piece of legislation that makes it to his desk has that much more potential to reward his own personal special interests, ensure the omnipotence of the party in power, and utterly disenfranchise the minority.

Of course, we’ve been down this road before. In 1996, a line-item veto somehow made it through Congress to be conferred upon President Clinton. And was immediately challenged in the courts by any and all parties who feared an end to “business as usual” in Washington. Had I been paying attention in 1996, I probably would have blamed President Clinton’s legion of political enemies for removing this powerful weapon of justice from the President’s arsenal. In my research for this piece, however, I came upon this line from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence to the 6-3 Supreme Court vote to declare the 1996 Line Item Veto unconstitutional:

“The principal object of the statute, it is true, was not to enhance the President’s power to reward one group and punish another, to help one set of taxpayers and hurt another, to favor one State and ignore another. Yet these are its undeniable effects. The law establishes a new mechanism which gives the President the sole ability to hurt a group that is a visible target, in order to disfavor the group or to extract further concessions from Congress.” [Emphasis mine.]

Bingo.

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