ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 3, 1997 TAG: 9701030084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
Six lawmakers launched a long-promised legal challenge Thursday to the constitutionality of a new law that vastly expands the power of the president by allowing him to strike specific programs from spending bills.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, the lawmakers allege that the line-item veto, a marquee item in the House Republicans' ``Contract With America'' last year, illegally rewrites the Constitution through its historic surrendering of congressional power to the office of the president. The new law, according to the suit, circumvents a constitutional requirement that the president veto whole bills, not pieces of them.
``The idea that one guy can go back and rearrange the pieces to suit himself smacks of a royal prerogative that we tried to get away from over 200 years ago,'' said Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., one of the six lawmakers who filed the suit.
How the issue is resolved could be critical to budget negotiations because it would let President Clinton cut specific spending items that Congress chose not to slash. And while the matter is in limbo, it could disrupt the negotiating strategies of both parties as they try to anticipate the effect that the veto - or lack of it - might have.
Skaggs and the others - Sens. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. - allege that such an extensive transfer of power from Congress to the president can only be done through a constitutional amendment, not merely through the passage of a statute.
``It's also a bad idea, even if it weren't unconstitutional,'' said Skaggs, a lawyer, ``because it shifts extensive direct and indirect power from a group of folks - Congress - to one person - the president.''
The six lawmakers allege that the line-item veto, which was signed by Clinton in April and took effect Wednesday, is a ruse: The president can sign an entire bill into law. And then, on his own, he can go back a few days later and ``cancel'' portions of the law, which would by then be on the books.
``After a bill becomes the law of the land, those magic words are binding on everybody,'' Levin said. ``With this version of the line-item veto, we are going to make an exception and say that the president is not bound by that and now has [power] denied George Washington and every president since then.''
Under the law, the president can use the veto on discretionary spending items dealing with particular projects, tax breaks affecting fewer than 100 people and expansions of entitlement programs.
Proponents of the line-item veto say governors in 43 states use similar power with few problems. They also argue that it will enable presidents to attack ``pork'' buried in the federal budget -those public projects that lawmakers put in spending legislation to benefit people in their districts or a special-interest group that they favor.
Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard University professor specializing in constitutional law, said the six lawmakers challenging the line-item veto have a point, but also have two legal hurdles to overcome: They must show they have legal standing to make the challenge and that the issue can be decided before the president has wielded the power.
``If those hurdles can be overcome and [they] can make it to first and second base, I think [they] can get all the way home,'' Tribe said. ``This is almost impossible to square with the way in which the Constitution in Article I structures the relationship between Congress's law-making process and the president's veto authority.''
LENGTH: Medium: 68 linesby CNB