THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 6, 1995 TAG: 9502060044
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RALEIGH LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
North Carolina's Republican-dominated House of Representatives and its Democratic-controlled Senate appear headed for their first showdown this week over how much veto authority to give the governor.
At issue is a proposal to grant the governor a line-item veto, or the authority to strike out specific accounts or projects within spending bills.
The Republican sponsors have included a line-item veto in their version of the bill. But Senate Democrats rebuffed a challenge by Republicans to include a line-item veto in the version that passed that chamber last week.
Rep. John M. Nichols, R-Craven, a sponsor of the House veto measure, said he will continue to press for a line-item veto and hopes Senate Democrats will change their minds.
``They need to realize that they're also up for re-election in two years,'' he said after a meeting of a House judiciary committee Thursday.
Nichols said work on the veto will be delayed until Tuesday, when the committee takes up the Senate version of the bill. He said the Republican-controlled committee will probably substitute some of the House veto language for the Senate version before sending it to the House floor for debate.
Passage of two different versions of a veto bill would mean the House and Senate will have to resolve their differences in a conference committee before the measure can be approved by the General Assembly and sent to the state's voters. A conference committee would be the first test of the new Republican House leaders against their more experienced Senate counterparts.
The House and Senate versions contain some similarities:
Both call for a three-fifths vote in both chambers to override a gubernatorial veto.
Both give the governor 10 days to veto bills.
Both exclude joint resolutions, General Assembly appointments, constitutional amendments and redistricting bills.
Both would bring legislators back to Raleigh within 40 days to consider whether to override any bill vetoed after the session has adjourned.
But only the House version includes the line-item veto and a measure excluding local bills from review by the governor.
Most legislative observers say that while the line-item veto is a measure House Republicans can't live without, it's apparently a proposal Senate Democrats can't live with.
Democrats voted as a bloc as the Senate rejected, 26-23, Republican amendments to include the items in the House bill.
Rocky Mount Democrat Roy A. Cooper III, sponsor of the Senate veto bill, said in floor debate Wednesday that North Carolina's governor would have enough power without giving him a line-item veto.
``The governor shouldn't be the one to unilaterally go in and decide on specific items,'' Cooper told his fellow senators. Specific spending measures ``should be the result of negotiations'' among the 170 members of the legislature, he said.
Proponents of a line-item veto tout the change as a means of holding governors more responsible for enacting their agendas and as a means of promoting more responsible spending by the General Assembly. Opponents say a line-item veto will not result in stronger state finances.
A recent review by economists John Carter and David Schap at the College of the Holy Cross of five studies of budget practices in the states found ``little or no evidence'' of a connection between the line-item veto and a state's fiscal health. And North Carolina, the only large state that does not use some form of the line-item veto, has the highest bond rating of those large states, their review found.
The governor's powers now include appointing hundreds of positions as high as Supreme Court justice without legislative approval. Other powers include control over billions of dollars in state highway funds and producing a state budget that is the starting point for decisions on state spending priorities.
Because the veto bill could change the state Constitution, it would need the approval of 60 percent of the House's 119 members, or 72 votes.
The Senate passed a veto bill by a 46-3 margin Wednesday, one week after the session started.
Because the Republicans control only 67 seats in the House, the measure needs the support of at least five Democrats to pass, leading to speculation that Republican supporters of a line-item veto may be willing to drop that provision in order to gain approval of some type of veto bill.
House Republicans counter that three Democrats in that chamber - Reps. Flossie Boyd-McIntyre of Jamestown, Walter Church of Valdese and Alex Warner of Hope Mills - have already signed onto the bill as sponsors along with most of the Republicans in the House, leaving them only two Democratic votes short of a showdown with the Senate.
KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY by CNB