When was the line item veto

In the Line Item Veto Act was enacted authorizing the President, after signing a bill into law, to cancel in whole any dollar amount of discretionary budget authority, any item of new direct spending, or any limited tax benefit if the President made certain determinations.

City of New York , U. Under that clause, the President must accept or veto in its entirety any bill passed by Congress. Granting the President line item veto authority would require a constitutional amendment.

Line Item Veto Unconstitutional: Clinton v. City of New York. Item Veto: Budget Savings. Skip to content Cyclopedia of Congressional Budget Law Line Item Veto Summary The Line Item Veto is the term used for the authority of a President to veto provisions of legislation presented to him for his signature rather than the bill or joint resolution in its entirety. Constitution provides that the President may either sign a measure into law or veto it in its entirety. However, constitutions in 43 states provide for an item veto usually confined to appropriation bills , allowing the governor to eliminate discrete provisions in legislation presented for signature.

The first proposal to provide the President with an item veto was introduced in Over the years many bills and resolutions mainly proposed constitutional amendments have been introduced, but action in Congress on item veto proposals, beyond an occasional hearing, has been limited.

In the House approved an item veto amendment to the independent offices appropriations bill by voice vote, but the Senate rejected the amendment. Contemporary proposals for item veto are usually confined to bills containing spending authority, although not necessarily limited to items of appropriation.

Follow Following. Others mourned because they believe that Congress has unwisely relinquished a significant portion of its constitutional power of the purse to the president and that he will use his new authority to force his budget priorities on Congress and, possibly, even to meddle with the independence of the judiciary. As is so often is the case in this the hyperbole capital of the world, the consequences of this legislation may be a good deal less than the rhetoric suggests.

Neither budget outcomes nor the distribution of political power is likely to change much if the line item veto survives a constitutional challenge and takes effect on Jan. Only a change in the Constitution could have conferred that power. At first glance, enhanced rescission authority looks like the real thing because it allows the president to selectively wipe out individual spending items in large appropriation bills or their reports, particular expansions of entitlement programs, and tax breaks that benefit only a handful of taxpayers.

His veto will prevail as long as he can rally the support of just one-third plus one of either the Senate or the House. On closer examination, however, it turns out that the seemingly formidable power of enhanced rescission is rather limited and can be easily circumvented.

Crafty legislative counsels will draft bills and write reports in ways that give the president few opportunities to veto favored items. But these tidbits amount to no more than the rounding errors in the Monthly Treasury Statement. The larger spending and taxing differences over which Congresses and presidents fight can always be cast as disagreements involving policy. On these, Congress will continue to pursue its priorities with all the weapons at its disposal.

Would it have left the president with the opportunity to cancel the funds it added to keep the B-2 bomber production line open? Chairmen and members of key committees and a few of their lucky colleagues get to slip spending items or tax breaks that carry Zip codes or PAC labels on them into legislation in the eleventh hour without any broad congressional scrutiny or, sometimes, even the knowledge of their compatriots.

Although no member has ever been defeated for trying to bring home too much bacon, some such provisions could prove politically embarrassing if, once the line item veto kicks in, the president decides to showcase them. To guard against this possibility, the congressional leaders will want to work out a mutually acceptable list of special-interest provisions with the president before Congress votes on each bill.

Presidents, after all, are politicians too, and pork is one of the basic food groups that sustain our political system. Some worry that a forceful or vindictive president—a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon, for example—might use the veto threat on particular distributive items to blackmail individual members into supporting presidential positions on matters of high policy.