THIS FALL THE BUSH administration and congressional Republicans will lay a major new spending control tool on the legislative workbench and try to enact it before Congress adjourns. Yet before even trying to pick it up, Democrats will reject it–saying it’s too heavy, too light, or somehow just not the right utensil to hammer away at the budget deficit.
President Bush and GOP legislators are rallying around a new version of the line item veto. The House already passed it in June 2006, by a vote of 247-172. But the lack of 60 votes in the Senate may doom enactment of this new federal spending control tool. The Democrats’ posture is just another example of how torrents of partisanship have cut deep and wide ravines between the parties on issues that were previously showered in bipartisan support.
Failure to enact the line item veto this year is an epithet to contemporary American politics–a world where “who does the asking” trumps the substance of the request. When President Clinton supported a line item veto in 1996, a strong bipartisan majority of voters, both Democrat and Republican, approved of the idea. A decade later, as President Bush posits an even weaker version of the line item veto, voters are divided on partisan lines, as with so many issues on today’s public policy landscape.
But before discussing how partisan polarization has affected the line item veto, some background on the debate about this spending control tool is in order. Throughout American history, the executive and legislative branches of government have sparred for dominance on federal spending policies. The House Rules Committee notes in a brief history of the line item veto that President Ulysses S. Grant first requested this authority from Congress because he was irritated by the excessive rise in the number of appropriations bill provisions not considered essential by the White House. Congress ignored the orders from the former Civil War general, essentially telling Grant to have a few more swigs of whiskey and relax.
The issue boiled over again in the early 1970s when President Nixon took matters into his own hands and began more aggressively using his “impoundment” authority. He instructed his executive branch agencies simply not to spend money he thought was unwarranted or wasteful. Presidents since Thomas Jefferson have used their impoundment authority in one way or another. But Nixon’s use, according to some lawmakers, was excessive. So Congress responded to Nixon’s “just say no” spending escapades by passing the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. While the new law set out the entire framework underlying today’s budget process, it created a new procedure specifically for rescissions. The President could still make these rescission requests, but if the House and Senate did not approve them in 45 days, the executive branch was obligated to spend the money.
Nothing much happened on the line item veto front at the federal level for over twenty years, except for presidents pleading with Congress to provide this spending control tool. In 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress teamed up with then President Bill Clinton, giving him the authority held by 43 Governors at the state level–line item veto authority. Under this legislation the president would send items he chose to veto back to Congress, and if lawmakers failed to restore the funding, it was gone.
It didn’t take too long for the new plan to face a legal challenge. And in Clinton v. City of New York, the U.S. Supreme Court held this version of the line item veto–which allowed the President’s requested cuts to go into effect if either the House or the Senate failed to pass a bill stopping them–violated the Presentment Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 7, Clause 2). This provision states that “every bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it becomes a Law, be presented to the President of the United States.” So the 1996 version of the line item veto, in effect, allowed presidential action to become law without both the House and the Senate acting.
Which brings us up to date. Today’s “legislative” line item veto avoids these Presentment Clause concerns. It allows the President to submit a package of rescissions to the Congress, but unlike under the 1974 Budget Act, lawmakers cannot ignore the request. The legislation lays out an expedited procedure under which the House and Senate would be compelled to act, usually in less than a few weeks depending on the congressional schedule, with a simple majority required for passage.
At one level, public support for the line item veto has been remarkably enduring and robust since the Clinton era. In a Gallup poll conducted August 12-13, 1997, 65 percent said they supported the concept and 24 percent opposed, with the balance having no opinion or refusing to answer. Fast forward to July 2006, when a DutkoWorldwide poll of 800 registered voters found exactly the same proportion–66 percent of all voters supported the concept of a line item veto.
But a glimpse behind the numbers provides some fascinating insights into the new polarized world order and the politics of “who does the asking.” In 1996, when President Clinton endorsed the concept, 69 percent of self-identified Democrats supported the line item veto. But now, when President Bush proposes a weaker version–one where both Houses of Congress must affirmatively act on his “vetoed” measures or the spending stands–Democrat support drops to 49 percent.
Whether these trends in public opinion are a cause or an effect of party leader behavior in Washington is debatable. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that these trends in voter attitudes are mirrored in Congress as well. More than twice as many Democrats in the House supported the line item veto in 1996, when Bill Clinton was president, than did so in 2006, when George W. Bush was asking for their support.
The utensils in today’s legislative toolbox normally used to find common ground are missing, replaced instead by mallets of stark partisan division on issues that previously garnered bipartisan support. Instead of hammering out consensus, Democrats are pounding Republicans and giving Congress a bloody thumb.
Gary Andres is Vice Chairman, Research and Policy, Dutko Worldwide, a columnist for the Washington Times and writes occasionally for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
