Line item Veto
There’s a lot of back and forth about giving the president the power of the line item veto through a constitutional amendment.
Candidates like Mitt Romney say that it’s essential in order to cut pork out of bills.
Others say that that it gives the president far to much power, and that it would allow the president to twist legislation, and that the line item veto has been abused in the past.
First of all I’m generally -against- giving the president more power. To much power in the hands of a single man is rarely a good thing.
An example of this is the recent debacle in Virginia where the line item veto was used, not to remove pork, but to change the basic meaning of a bill. The bill said that no smoking could occur inside a bar or restaurant unless a sign was posted in the window that said it would allow smoking. In other words they made a small change to make it so that bar owners had to consciously make a choice, and so that people that didn’t want to be in a smoking establishment could just walk on by it the way smokers can walk on by a bar that doesn’t allow smoking because it displays a no smoking sign in the window.
The governor removed the part that said they could allow smoking in their bar by posting a sign. He also removed language that defined what a restaurant was, restricting it to indoor venues, and leaving it as any place that serves food, such as wedding receptions, ball parks, and even the area around a street vendor’s cart. Now I’m not saying that smoking is good, and discouraging it is bad, I’m just saying that the governor made the change enacted by the bill a more potent change using his line item veto power.
I’m also against pork… but I don’t think that we need to give the president the line item veto in order to get rid of it. I think that what it would take is simply for the American public to become more politically active and informed.
When discussing this issue with others they’ve asked why the president doesn’t just veto the spending bills, well the problem is not in bills dedicated to spending, but the current trend to take a good bill, then make several amendments to add spending items to it.
Then if the president vetoes the bill because of pork, or a congressperson votes against the bill because of pork, they are on the record as having done so. This gives their opponents ammo to say that they voted against a bill most people would have been behind before all of the pork was added, even if the bill became quite a poor one with all of the spending initiatives attached.
And if you give the president the ability to strike out lines from a law, how are you going to specifically limit that to ’spending’ items in a way that prevents him from striking anything else, and also prevents loopholes?
Several people have said that that’s the only thing the president would be given the ability to line-item, but in all the discussions I’ve heard about it I’ve never heard that the president would only be able to line item veto spending sections, but rather that pork is the main reason to give him the general line item veto power.
I’d post links to the news items where I got the information about Mitt Rumney’s position, and the Virginia Govenor, but while Fox news provides free video feeds on their websites, they make it nigh impossible to embed in a page, or even link to it.
The articles are in their news section politics sub-section, labeled “Mitt’s Momentum”, and Butt out.