Line Item Veto

At a time when I'm concerned about the change in balance of power in the U.S. government, and when I'm strongly scared by the consolidation of Congressional power from a decentralized model to one in which the power is concentrated at the top, this may seem like a very strange thing for me to advocate, but...

We need the Line Item Veto, or else a change in the way Congress works. Not to give the Executive branch more power over the Congress, and not (specifically) to eliminate pork-barrel agreements, but to give us a fighting chance to trim this nation’s government down to a level we can actually afford to pay for.

An article in the June, 2005 Readers Digest by Michael Crowley (no information on what source it might have been condensed from) lays out clearly some of the problems with the current Congressional process. This article indicates what we’ve known for a long time: That riders attached to bills (and sometimes the bills themselves) are often not distributed to the Senators who will be required to vote on them until the 11th hour. Even with a full staff devoted to nothing but reading through the bills, there simply isn’t time for a Senator to know what he or she is voting on, so they generally have to vote solely on the face of the bill, and just accept the detritus which may come along with it.

Some examples from this article of riders which have been passed recently, of which most Senators were unaware:

• A law allowing Congress the right to read through individual tax returns, and even to designate that right to someone they appoint. A single line, added by a House staffer to a bill at the last minute, and suddenly this was law. (It has since been repealed)
• The same bill also had loads of “pork” riders, including $1.5 million to determine the feasibility of getting water from Lake Ontario to two New York counties.
• A provision in a defense bill to have the Air Force lease fuel tanker jets from Boeing instead of buying them outright, at an additional cost of billions (slipped in at the behest of a “key Pentagon official” who was at the same time setting up jobs with Boeing for herself and her family).
• A law requiring the results of gun purchase background checks be destroyed within 24 hours instead of the previous 90 days.
• I don’t have references for this one, but I remember a 60 Minutes broadcast back in the 80s about a large pay raise (roughly 80%) Congress voted themselves (and really, how many jobs are there where you can set your own salary?). Although it’s old, I mention it because it was when I first became aware of the dangers inherent in the rider system.

The fact is that the current system allows things like this to slide through, as well as providing many opportunities for pork barrel deals. “Hey, I’ll vote for your bill, if you’ll let me attach a rider to funnel money into my state.” Under the current system, neither the Congress nor the White House can separate the items, once put together(*).

If we seriously want fiscal responsibility in our government, there has to be someone at some level who has the power to go through these bill bundles and say “Wait a second, this piece is bogus. It has nothing to do with the main bill and is not good for the country, it’s required to go back and be passed on it’s own merit.”

(* Obviously, Congress can repeal a piece of the bill, once passed, and of course with a proper motion and a proper vote, a rider can be stripped from it’s parent bill. But given the timing of the votes, there simply isn’t time in most cases for the second, and the first... unless someone catches the offending section and complains about it, it’s not likely to be repealed.)

Copyright (c) May 30, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net