LINE ITEM VETO

 

Wall Street Journal – 3/9/06

 

            With the annual federal budget closing in on $2,710,000,000,000, Republicans on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue are showing signs of rediscovering their long-lost fiscal conscience.

            This week two House Republican conservatives Jeb Henserling, of Texas and Mike Pence of Indiana, outlined a budget proposal that would cut federal spending by $600 billion over the next six years. That's out of an estimated $16 trillion in spending over the same period, and would probably balance the budget by 2012. Their plan has no chance of being adopted, but it's nice to know at least someone on Capitol Hill is representing the Republican wing of the Republican Party.

            An even more promising idea is this week's White House request that Congress pass a line-item veto. This would allow the President to delete, one by one, some of the most wasteful items in the 1,000-page spending bills that are delivered, practically via fork lift, to the Oval Office. Such veto power would give a President greater leverage over bridges to nowhere in' Alaska, asparagus research grants and any of the other 13,994 projects that Congressmen delivered to their districts last year to buy votes for their re-election.

            We're under no illusion that an item veto would balance the federal budget or reform runaway entitlements. But pork projects cost the taxpayers $27.1 billion last year alone-more than the entire budgets of most states. If Congress would pull the plug on the funding of the 141 obsolete, duplicative and /or counterproductive programs that the White House asked Congress to zero out in February, this would save another $15 billion. That's a start.

            Virtually every President since Abe Lincoln has requested this veto power. Al Gore was for it. John Kerry still is. The GOP Congress gave it to Bill Clinton, and to his credit he cut $2 billion from 82 projects-until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1998 because of a technical flaw in the way it was written.

            The Bush proposal is designed to pass Constitutional muster because it would require that Congress vote up or down within 10 days      on a White House decision to "rescind" certain spending. Only a majority vote would be needed to override, but the rescissions couldn't be filibustered. Under current law, when the President proposes to rescind spending, Congress can block the request simply by ignoring it-which it does with impenitent regularity.

            Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan has tried to pass a version of this in recent years, only to be opposed by his own leadership. Tom DeLay even voted against it. If Republicans can't pass this now with Mr. Bush's backing and even some liberal support, they'll deserve whatever pummeling they take in November.

            This is also a first step in the larger mission that Republicans should undertake to rewrite the entire 1974 Budget Act, which was passed to make it easier to spend and tax. Among other damage, the 1974 act eliminated the power that Presidents of both parties had used for decades to "impound"-that is, not spend-certain money appropriated by Congress on wasteful programs. Mr. Bush's proposal would restore at least some of that power.

            Mr. Bush is now the longest serving President since Thomas Jefferson never to use his veto pen. Since the veto is among the strongest powers that the President has under the Constitution and Congress has been so undisciplined, this ranks as one of Mr. Bush's largest failures. A McLaughlin poll released this week finds that 72% of voters now believe the budget is growing too fast. Enacting the line-item veto would be Congress's way of telling the President: Stop us before we spend again.