ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 6, 1997 TAG: 9701060104
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
WITH THE coming of the new year, a line-item budget veto for the president went into effect. Within 24 hours, its constitutionality was challenged in a lawsuit filed by six members of Congress.
While the suit is hardly frivolous, its outcome will have more effect on power balances in Washington than on the condition of the nation's finances. That's because, as a tool of fiscal control, the line-item veto is basically a sham. If anything, say some scholars, the likely effect over time will be to encourage rather than curb budgetary excess.
The new law does raise serious constitutional issues. The Constitution puts the power of the purse in congressional, not presidential, hands and requires that presidential vetoes be of whole bills, not parts of bills. Does the complicated procedure set up by the line-item law sufficiently sidestep constitutional provisions? And even assuming a current Congress can voluntarily alter its own rules to in effect establish a line-item veto, can future Congresses be made subject to such a constraint on constitutional powers?
If the answer to such questions turns out to be no, fret not.
In their 1994 book "Debt and Taxes," John H. Makin and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute listed three devastating criticisms of the line-item veto. Time already has proved two correct, and given no reason to discount the third.
First, the deep deficit declines of recent years without benefit of line-item vetoes or balanced-budget amendments have shown that political will (assisted by an improved economy), and not structural gimmicks, is the key to fiscal responsibility. Second, entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are even more clearly today than in 1994 the areas where fiscal concern ought to be most intense, yet are outside the scope of line-item vetoes.
Makin-Ornstein criticism No. 3? Historically in Western democracies, the executive branch (whose powers are increased by the line-item veto) tends to be the promoter of big-government centralization, and the legislative branch (whose powers are weakened) to be the resister. With this in mind, they offered a couple of examples of how the line-item veto might have worked in the not-so-distant past.
In 1984, Republican President Ronald Reagan wanted more MX missiles than Congress was willing to fund. Had he had a line-item veto, he could have threatened to nix pet projects of MX-opposing congressmen. Net effect: more spending on the MX and retention of the congressional pets. In 1993, you change the details, from Reagan to Democratic President Clinton and from the MX to Clinton's proposed economic-stimulus package, but the dynamic is the same.
On this point, the final verdict may still be out. But those might-have-beens powerfully suggest a what-will-be.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB