President Bush has frequently portrayed many of his most controversial actions as necessary to protect executive branch prerogatives against usurpations of power by Congress. So it isespecially curious that Bush has yet to use the most potent weapon the Founders gave occupants of the Oval Office against Congress: the veto.
If Bush is truly serious about protecting the powers and prerogatives of his office, he will set aside his veto reservations and slam-dunk the emergency funding bill if it comes to his desk in anything remotely resembling the form in which the Senate passed it last week. Bush originally asked for $92 billion to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and to assist with hurricane recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast. The House approved the bill substantially as Bush requested.
Things were completely different in the Senate, where the Old Bulls had a field day larding the measure up with nearly $20 billion worth of special-interest earmarks like $700 million for the “Railroad to Nowhere” in Mississippi. A valiant effort by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to remove a dozen of the worst earmarks failed and the thoroughly stuffed final measure was approved by a wide margin. Passage came within days of release of a highly credible survey that said stopping such spending sprees was the public’s top priority.
That is why the conditions could not now be more perfect for a presidential veto. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and 34 other senators vowed to vote to sustain a presidential veto if needed and House Speaker Dennis Hastert declared the $109 billion earmark-stuffed monstrosity “dead on arrival” in the lower chamber.
But between now and the time the final version of the bill arrives on the president’s desk, a conference committee will have to work out the profound differences between the Senate and House versions. Strange things often happen behind the closed doors of such congressional pow-wows, including the quiet resurrection of measures previously declared dead.
Tellingly, the Senate’s GOP and Democratic leadership appointed a bunch of conferees to negotiate with the House who exemplify the very worst of the corrupt spending culture that has apparently infected three-fourths of what was once known as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Now, it looks like more than a few senators prefer that their chamber be the world’s porkiest.
If the House somehow caves on this one and allows the Senate’s earmark-laden emergency spending measure to become the basis of what is sent to the White House, Bush will be the last official in Washington with a chance to control the federal Leviathan’s voracious appetite for tax dollars that come straight out of your paycheck.
If Bush fails to deliver his first veto now, it won’t much matter for the rest of his term what he thinks about executive branch powers, because the Old Bulls in Congress will have all the privileges that count.
