Line Item Veto Essay, Research Paper

The line-item veto allows the president, like most state governors, to kill individual or line items out of spending bills without killing the entire bill. Until this year, the president had to accept or reject bills in their entirety, a fairly drastic course of action to get at a handful of items since the typical spending bill covers several agencies and tens of billions of dollars.

That limitation has been a growing incentive for Congress to load up bills with personal projects and non-germane spending, generally referred to, fairly or unfairly, as pork. This pork only consisted of a fraction of the budget.

The line item veto puts too much power in to the hands on one person. If the President happens to be corrupt, or a crook, which is possible, the line item veto could create a huge problem. There would be many ways for the President to take advantage of his new power. Lets pretend that the health insurance industry runs TV advertisements that attack the Presidents health care legislation. The President could simply give the health industry a phone call and say something like, “If you really want those special tax cuts for your company, you’d better can those ads!” Its frightening to think of how many ways this power could be abused, and its equally scary to see just how easy and possible it is for something like this to happen.

It seems really silly to place so much power and faith in one person to fix the country’s money problems. Instead of giving the President the federal budget “white-out”, we should be solving the problem from its root, Congress. Congress’ spending at times is out of control, and that is what should be looked at. I think the way to go would be to help Congress make better decisions on how they spend the taxpayers money, that way the problem gets solved. Even though the intention of the line item veto is to solve the federal budget, the President may compound the problem by cutting funding to the wrong programs.