ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 28, 1996 TAG: 9603280058
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
The Senate voted Wednesday to hand the president a piece of the most precious gift the Constitution bestows upon Congress: the power of the purse.
The bill, which gives the president the equivalent of a line-item veto, is expected to pass the House this week.
Both Virginia senators, Republican John Warner and Democrat Charles Robb, voted for it.
Rarely does Congress agree to give the president more power, but this bill does just that - marking a historic shift in the checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers.
The measure, which the Senate approved 69-31, would go into effect next year.
With the new power, the president could strike from spending and revenue bills passed by Congress many individual items he didn't like.
The president would be able to delete spending items as well as targeted tax breaks that benefit 100 or fewer taxpayers, and he could remove provisions that entitle groups of people to certain benefits.
In his 1997 budget proposal, for instance, President Clinton suggested a number of items that he would strip from defense spending if he had the authority, including $140 million for purchasing Kiowa helicopters and $9 million for Navy Fast Patrol crafts. Last year, among scores of items, the president objected to $1.4 million for a National Swine Research Center at Iowa State University.
``Congress created the nation's $5 trillion debt and now it's Congress' responsibility to fix it,'' said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a sponsor of the bill.
But opponents, led by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., call the bill ``a colossal mistake we will come to regret.''
Technically, the bill sets up a process known as ``enhanced rescission.'' Lawmakers had to call it that because a pure line-item veto - under which the president could simply strike out specific programs or projects in spending bills with little congressional recourse - poses serious constitutional questions.
Here's how it would work:
* 1. Congress would pass a spending (or tax) bill and send it to the president.
* 2. He could list items in the bill he wanted rescinded and send it back to Congress.
* 3. Congress would then either accept all or part of the president's rescissions or reject them and send the rejections, in a bill of disapproval, back to the White House.
* 4. The president would veto that bill and send it back to Congress.
* 5. Congress would either accept the veto or try to overturn it.
The president would likely win this legislative badminton game most of the time because it takes a two-thirds majority in each house to override a veto and Congress rarely musters those votes.
Both Republican and Democratic presidents - from Ronald Reagan to Clinton - love the idea. They have said it would give the president a potent check on Congress' free-spending tendencies and put lawmakers on a diet from the pork barrel.
The 1996 Republican presidential nominee, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, is a prime mover of the bill. ``It'll strengthen the president's hand in moving to a balanced budget,'' he said.
Some say the Republican-controlled Congress' eagerness to surrender this power could be rooted not only in its desire to balance the budget, but also in a need to compensate for the failure of its agenda last year. Line-item veto power was part of the Republicans' Contract With America.
``Since they blew the end game on the balanced budget in 1995,'' said Thomas Mann, political analyst at the Brookings Institution, ``they have to have some achievement to show voters in 1996. And this is something that President Clinton will let pass.''
Dole and Clinton agreed the bill should not go into effect until next Jan. 1 to keep it out of the politically charged election campaign. By then, voters will have decided whether Clinton or Dole should be president next year.
Despite the compromise bill's roundabout route around the Constitution, critics say enhanced rescission is indistinguishable from a straight line-item veto because the result is exactly the same: more power ceded to the president.
``It gives a president a club which he can wield to beat members of Congress into submission in support of administration policies,'' Byrd said.
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