After dragging its feet more than a year, Congress is finally on the verge of equipping the president of the United States with a line-item veto.
For this breakthrough, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole can take a bow. It was he who knocked a few heads together and is getting the Senate to put aside its complicated measure in favor of the House's version of the line-item veto.Even so, it should not have taken nearly this long to give the nation's chief executive a sensible fiscal tool long possessed by the governors of 43 states, including Utah, favored by 62 per cent of the public, and requested by every U.S. president since Ulysses S. Grant.
Nor is there any excuse for the filibuster some senators are now threatening to direct against the com-pro-mise measure authorizing the line-item veto.
With this authority, the president will have the power to veto individual items in appropriations bills. Otherwise, he must either sign or veto entire spending measures even when they are loaded with pork barrel projects piggybacking on sensible and necessary spending.
In February of last year, the House passed a line-item veto bill. A month later the Senate followed suit - but with a bill that was excessively and needlessly complicated.
Under the now-abandoned Senate version, large spending bills would have been broken up into hundreds of smaller bills, each representing a separate program item and each subject to presidential veto.
The compromise worked out this week is largely along the lines of the House bill. In it, the president is to single out items for veto and return them to Congress in a package. Congress then has 30 days to decide what items, if any, it wants to restore. A two-thirds vote is needed to overturn the presidential veto, the same margin required to override vetoes of bills not involving appropriations.
The line-item veto is no cure-all for what ails federal spending. But many pork-barrel projects should have a tough time standing up to closer, more individual scrutiny and then winning two-thirds support. In any event, the authorization of this tool should give Congress one less excuse for not whittling down the deficit and eventually balancing the big and bloated federal budget.