Hail the Conquering Caesar

Needlenose | We Needle. You Decide.
By fubar
Nov 26 2004 - 3:48pm

I don't know whether to laugh or weep.

AP:

Bush issued a new appeal for the power to delete specific items that he deems excessive from budget plans. He spoke a week after Congress approved a $388 billion spending package that lawmakers loaded up with special items for their home-state industries and communities.
...
'The only way a president can affect that which is inside the bill, other than vetoing the entire bill, is to be able to pick out parts of a bill and express displeasure about it through a line-item veto. I hope the Congress will give me a line-item veto.'

He should have continued to say: 'Because somebody has to protect your hard-earned tax dollars from those spend-happy dickheads in Congress... and that would be me.' Except that his appeal for fiscal sanity at this point is a little like Arnold complaining about too much violence in movies.

You would think the President would want line-item veto so he could save the taxpayer some money, but no:

The president said he was not troubled by the total cost of the measure, which he said conformed to the outlines of spending requests he had made to lawmakers.

But, he said, 'there's going to be things in these big bills that I don't particularly care for.'

In other words, he doesn't have a problem with how much these bills cost, just what's in them. Let's ignore the inconvenient fact that it's his own party that's loading up these bills with things he 'don't particularly care for.' If the point of the line-item veto isn't to limit spending, then it can be nothing but a naked power-grab by the Executive wanting to assume the powers of the Legislative over allocation of resources.

No problem there, except that it's in direct violation of Article I, Sections 7 (the so-called Presentment Clause) and possibly 8 of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court says so too.

Political capital, indeed.