Line Item Veto

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For those who do not know, the line item
veto allows the president to veto certain individual parts of
passed legislation without rejecting the
legislation as a whole.


The fundamental flaw that I see with the Line Item
Veto is that it gives the president too much power
and it would make congress comparatively
inferior.

Another problem is that if a president eliminates
certain parts of a bill (especially in a case if
the parts of the bill are interconnected or
dependent on each other), the bill could be
distorted out of it's intended context or it could
be ineffective.

How can congress cast a vote on any piece of
legislation if they don't know what the final
product is going to be? The final product, once
the president modifies it, may be something that a
representative regrets voting for.

Also, it is going to make partisan politics worse.
Two parties could spend a lot of effort into
compromising and writing a bill which both sides
agree on, but once it reaches the president's
desk, the president would easily be able to make
the bill unilateral by cutting out the policies of
the other party.

Of course the Line Item Veto quality of the
president. A good president would use the power
wisely to shave wasteful spending. But a Line
Item Veto would also be able to be abused by a bad
president. An uncooperative leader can use the
power out of spite. An incompetent leader would
have more room to make error.

ome spending such as pork barrel earmarks are
wasteful, but other spending isn't wasteful.

By giving the president the power to veto
unnecessary spending, you give him/her the power
to veto necessary spending as well, which is a bad
precedent to set.

The president could cut defense spending during a
war and can cut effective programs.

Proponents of the unconstitutional line item veto
suggest that it cuts waste and inefficiency out of
government, but it can also do the opposite.

The line item veto works on ALL provisions of the
legislation. Yes, the president can cut spending
and cut tax increases, but the president can cut
tax decreases or provisions of the bill which will
cut spending.

If an bill is passed containing the provision that
the president is allowed to veto specific parts of
that individual piece of legislation, that would
not be a problem as the president has consent of
congress to do so.

But setting a precedent to give the president even
more power than congress can be dangerous in the
long run.

Last edited by swansong on 21 Feb 2010, 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm in favor of the line item veto in the case of bills that bundle together a number of unrelated issues in order to piggyback bad legislation onto necessary bills. A better solution, of course, would be for new Congressional rules ensuring more or less single-issue bills.

Agreed.

There should be a Constitutional requirement that bills only deal with one issue. This "tacking on" thing Congress does is abused in too many ways.

A good example is the Real ID Act of 2005. It's an illegal law because it was tacked onto an emergency spending bill, and Constitutional rules prohibit any legislation being attached onto spending bills...but it's the law of the land in spite of violating that rule.

There is little chance of enforcing the rule of single issue bills. The L.I.V. has a better chance of passing. Not much better, though.

ruveyn