One of the problems with our legislative process is that essential bills needed to keep the country in business, such as defense and tax, are held hostage to the pork lobby. When a congressman or senator such as the gray eminence and past master of pork, Robert Byrd (D-W. VA) decides he needs a new highway named after him, he amends the bill to authorize an appropriation for a few hundred million and he gets a new highway. Since the bill on which his appropriation authorization sits, in a process called "earmarking" the funds or the bill, must pass because otherwise we have no army, the pork project passes as well. Since all the congressmen and senators are expected to bring back the bacon to their districts, we find ourselves with dam, bridge and road projects, such as the Bridge-to-Nowhere out of Ketchikan, Alaska recently. It was defeated after the uproar, but the money was allowed to go to Alaska to spend any way it felt like so as not to deprive that great state, and its illustrious senator, of taxpayer money to spend on pet projects.
This drives presidents, who campaign on a promise to balance the budget, nuts. They want to be able to draw a red line through what they consider to be unnecessary pork, and to punish legislators who don't cooperate on other legislative matters, no doubt. Red-lining out pork projects that ought to be killed is called exercising a line-item veto, as these projects appear in the appropriations bill as "line-items," a list, essentially.
The last time Congress passed a Line-Item Veto Act (LIVA), Pres. Clinton drew the red line through a couple of items he thought redundant or unnecessary and the statute passed by Congress authorizing him to do this was held unconstitutional. Why? Because when Congress passes a bill, it gets sent to the president to sign into law or to veto in its entirety. The Constitution does not give the president the power to re-write congressional legislation by striking a word here and a word there to change its meaning. That would be a violation of the doctrine of separation of powers, by which each branch does its thing, but not anther's. The case is Clinton v. City of New York (1998).
Pres. Bush has asked Congress to pass a new version of LIVA, set forth here.
The question for you is to determine what's different about the new Bush bill that will save it from being declared unconstitutional just as the former Clinton bill.
Clue: Look to see who actually gets to strike line-items after the president raises an objection, the president, or Congress.
One learned commentator, SB, says:
This seems pretty clearly constitutional to me, even under Clinton v. CONY, (which, I'll admit, I think was wrongly decided).
This is even less of a "line-item veto" than was the law invalidated in Clinton.
All this is is a fast-track procedure for recission bills, together with an authorization for the president temporarily to suspend spending.
No appropriation gets permanently cancelled unless a law is passed by the ordinary Article I, Section 7 process.
So what's the problem?
Cool, right?