Revised April 21,
2006
PROPOSED
LINE-ITEM VETO LEGISLATION WOULD
INVITE ABUSE BY EXECUTIVE BRANCH:
President Could Continue Withholding Funds
After Congress Voted to Release Them
by
Richard Kogan
The Administration has proposed the Legislative Line Item Veto Act of 2006,
which was recently introduced in Congress by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
(R-Tenn.) as S. 2381 and by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as H.R. 4890.[1]
Both the House and the Senate are expected to consider the proposal in coming
months.
The proposal would allow the President to sign
appropriations acts and tax and entitlement legislation, and then strike
specific provisions from them. He would be allowed to strike far more than
“earmarks.” For example, the President could, if he chose, leave all earmarks
in place while eliminating all funding for the 91 programs he proposed to
eliminate in his February 2006 budget.
Under the proposal, when the President chose to strike
amounts from appropriations acts, he could withhold the funds in question for
180 days. During that time, Congress would be required to vote on whether
to pass legislation eliminating the funding as the President had requested,
without any amendments being allowed. If Congress turned down the President’s
request to eliminate the funds the President could continue to withhold them
for months after Congress had voted to reject his request to eliminate the
funding. Some of the funds could expire in the meantime if the 180-day period
extended beyond the end of the fiscal year for which the funds had been
appropriated.
As acting Congressional Budget Office director
Donald Marron explained in recent testimony on the proposal, the withholding of
funds “would not end upon the Congress’s rejection of the rescission
proposals…,” giving the President the “power to unilaterally defer spending for
six months, thereby effectively canceling some budget authority and some
programs altogether (for which the funding would lapse at the end of the fiscal
year…”[2]
The President also could use the new “line-item veto”
procedure to strike provisions of new entitlement legislation and certain new
“targeted tax benefits” contained in recently enacted tax bills. This authority
would be far broader with respect to entitlement expansions than with respect to
tax cuts. In fact, it appears Congressional tax-writers could draft new tax
breaks in a way that made them exempt from the new procedure.
How Would the New Proposal
Differ From the President’s Existing Authority to Propose Rescissions?
The new proposal would significantly expand the President’s
authority. Currently, the President can request that Congress rescind (or
cancel) enacted appropriations, and he can temporarily withhold the money in
question while Congress considers the rescission request. The new procedure the
Administration is proposing would be in addition to these existing
procedures. (If the President wished Congress to rescind funding, he would be
free to submit his rescission proposals to Congress under either set of
procedures.)
The new procedure would differ from the existing rescission
procedure in a number of important ways:
-
The new procedure would give the
President a “fast track” to force an up-or-down congressional vote on his
package of terminations in its entirety. The package of cancellations could not
be divided into separate parts, amended, or filibustered. The vote would occur
within 10 days of the package’s introduction in Congress as a piece of
legislation, and within 13 days of the President’s submitting the package. (The
package would have to be introduced in Congress within three days after the
President submitted it.)
-
The President could package his
proposed cancellations in any way he wanted. He could split his proposed
cancellations of items from a single piece of legislation into a number of
packages, sending Congress a separate “package” for each proposed cancellation
and compelling Congress to take dozens of individual votes. Or, he could
combine cancellations from different bills — both appropriations bills
and bills affecting mandatory programs — into a single package. Congress would
have to cast an up-or-down vote on each package exactly as the President had
constructed it. In sharp contrast, the existing rescission procedure allows
Congress to package the President’s rescission requests in ways that are most
convenient for congressional consideration, amend the President’s rescission
requests, or decline to vote on them.
-
The new procedures would allow the
President to withhold funding for 180 days after he proposed a package of
terminations, even if Congress voted quickly to reject the terminations.
If the President submitted a package of cancellations in the spring of a year,
he could effectively kill various items simply by withholding funding until the
end of the fiscal year on September 30, even if Congress had acted swiftly to
reject his proposed cancellations.[3]
This lengthy period of withholding obviously is not necessary, since the
fast-track mechanism in the proposal would require a vote in Congress within 13 days
of Congress’ receiving the President’s package of proposed
cancellations. The existing rescission procedure allows the President to
withhold funds requested for rescission for 45 days, not 180 days. (In recent
Congressional testimony, Rep. Paul Ryan stated that the bill’s 180-day
withholding provision “is required to make sure that Congress has the
opportunity to act if the President’s rescission proposal is made directly
before an extended recess.”[4]
This argument does not withstand scrutiny. The bill could have followed the
current rescission procedures, under which the clock on the withholding period
does not run during Congressional recesses of more than three days. The
Administration evidently made a decision not to follow that approach and instead
to allow the President to continue withholding funds regardless of Congressional
action.)
-
Exacerbating this problem, it appears
that if the President proposed the rescission of funds under either the existing
rescission procedure or the new procedure and Congress did not accede to his
request, the President could then re-propose the same rescissions
under the other procedure, withholding the funds for an additional period of
time and thereby increasing the chances that the funding would effectively be
cancelled despite congressional opposition to the cancellation. (The funding
would effectively be cancelled if the fiscal year ended before the withholding
period did.
-
Another difference between the proposed
procedure and the President’s current rescission authority is that under the new
procedure, the President could propose the elimination of appropriations
for discretionary programs but not a reduction in funding for such
programs. If the President wanted to reduce but not eliminate a program or line
item, however, he could continue to use the existing rescission procedures.
-
Another significant point is that under
the new procedure, if Congress enacted a package of cancellations that the
President had submitted, the Budget Committee Chairmen would reduce accordingly
the amount allocated to the Appropriations Committees for the fiscal year in
question. The effect would be to dedicate all savings from the cancellations to
deficit reduction. This rigid approach is problematic, however, and could well
prove self-defeating. A legitimate purpose of eliminating certain unworthy
projects may be to direct scarce funds to higher priority programs, but that
would not be permitted under the new procedure. And without the opportunity to
redirect at least some of the savings to better uses, Congress is likely to be
less willing to approve the President’s package of cancellations in the first
place.
-
The new procedure could be applied not
only to appropriations for discretionary programs but also to new entitlement
legislation and to new “targeted tax benefits” contained in recently enacted tax
bills. The President could propose to cancel or scale back an increase
in benefits or eligibility in a provision of an entitlement bill if he submitted
his request after enactment of the bill but before his next annual budget was
issued.
Since many entitlement increases work by making additional categories of
people eligible for benefits or increasing benefits by changing the formulas for
calculating them, the authority to scale back a new entitlement increase appears
to give the President the authority to change entitlement laws in unexpected
ways. For instance, if Congress created a Medicare “buy in” option for
uninsured people between the ages of 62 and 65, the President might be able to
use the new procedure to scale back this entitlement increase by raising the
buy-in age to 63 for some types of people and to 64 for others, even if Congress
had not created any such distinction between eligible individuals.
-
The story is quite different with
regard to “targeted tax benefits,” which the President could propose to cancel
but not to scale back. Of particular note, under the Administration’s
proposal, the term “targeted tax benefit” would be defined so narrowly that it
appears Congress could design special-interest tax breaks so they would be
exempt from any possible presidential rescission.
Targeted tax benefits would be defined as measures that provide a tax
break to 100 or fewer beneficiaries. The definition of targeted tax break used
in the proposal is identical to the definition used in the Line Item Veto Act of
1996. At the time the earlier legislation was enacted, the Joint Committee on
Taxation indicated that tax benefits generally could be drafted in ways that
would make them exempt from this presidential authority, even if they were
targeted to 100 or fewer people.
Note that the
proposal would establish unequal treatment of entitlement increases and tax
breaks. The President could use the proposed fast-track procedure to force a
vote on the cancellation of an entitlement improvement that would benefit
millions of people, but he would not be able to force a vote on a tax
break if it benefited as few as 101 people. This is despite the finding by
Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the Government Accountability Office,
and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that many tax breaks are
analogous to entitlement programs and are properly thought of as “tax
expenditures” or “tax entitlements.”[5]
In addition, the President could modify and rewrite entitlement improvements and
create new entitlement categories and program distinctions that Congress never
intended, but he could make no such modifications even in targeted tax
cuts affecting fewer than 100 tax payers; he could only accept these targeted
tax breaks or propose to cancel them.
Finally, the new procedure would place the savings achieved by vetoing an
entitlement increase into a “lockbox,” as with vetoed items from appropriations
bills. But the savings from vetoing a targeted tax benefit would appear not
to be placed in a lockbox and thus would remain available for another tax cut
(although the drafting of the bill is murky on this point).
Would The Proposal Reduce The
Deficit?
The Congressional Budget Office has suggested that the
consequences of this proposal might be to increase total spending rather than
reduce it, because “Congress might accommodate some of the President’s
priorities in exchange for a pledge not to propose rescission of certain
provisions, thereby increasing total spending.” CBO says that studies of states
with line-item vetoes have “documented similar devices employed by state
legislatures.”[6]
The columnist George Will makes the same point:[7]
Arming presidents with a line-item veto might increase federal spending,
for two reasons. First, Josh Bolten, director of the Office of Management
and Budget, may be exactly wrong when he says the veto would be a
“deterrent” because legislators would be reluctant to sponsor spending that
was then singled out for a veto. It is at least as likely that, knowing the
president can veto line items, legislators might feel even freer to pack
them into legislation, thereby earning constituents’ gratitude for at least
trying to deliver. Second, presidents would buy legislators’ support on
other large matters in exchange for not vetoing the legislators’ favorite
small items.
Congressional Research Service senior specialist
Louis Fisher also came to the conclusion that presidents would more likely use
line-item veto authority to pressure lawmakers to support White House spending
policies by threatening to cut Members’ pet projects, than to reduce total
spending or the deficit. In a 2005 report, Fisher warned that “experience with
the item veto, both conceptually and in actual practice, suggests that the
amounts that might be saved by a presidential item veto could be relatively
small, in the range of perhaps one to two billion dollars a year. Under some
circumstances, the availability of an item veto could increase spending. The
Administration might agree to withhold the use of an item veto for a particular
program if Members of Congress agreed to support a spending program initiated by
the President. Aside from modest savings, the impact of an item veto may well
be felt in preferring the President's spending priorities over those enacted by
Congress.”[8]
Finally, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the
Congressional Budget Office from February 2003 to December 2005 and now a fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently observed that, “I don’t think
there’s any evidence that this, in itself, is a powerful enough weapon to alter
the path of spending.” Holtz-Eakin noted that in studying the effect of
line-item vetoes at the state level, he found they produced mixed results. He
found no major differences in spending between states where governors had this
power and states where they did not.[9]
Similarly, in his recent testimony on this proposal, the current acting CBO
director noted that in the absence of a political consensus to establish fiscal
discipline, “the proposed changes to the rescission process included in H.R.
4890 are unlikely to greatly affect the budget’s bottom line.”[10]
Would the
Proposal Improve the Quality of Legislation and the Political Process?
Mr. Will’s second point, cited above, is not just about the
size of the federal budget but also about the political power of the President.
The current division of powers gives the President the power to veto
legislation, but balances this presidential power by giving Congress the power
to package legislation. The new proposal would further weaken Congress in
relation to the President by enabling the President to propose cancellations
that could divide the congressional coalition that had negotiated the
legislation in the first place. Mr. Will concludes that “The line-item veto's
primary effect might be political, and inimical to a core conservative value.
It would aggravate an imbalance in our constitutional system that has been
growing for seven decades: the expansion of executive power at the expense of
the legislature.”
As Will makes clear, the proposal would enhance the
President’s ability to engage in political “horse-trading” with members of
Congress. The President also would gain enhanced ability to engage in political
horse-trading with outside groups. Whether dealing with legislators or outside
groups, the President could threaten to propose the cancellation of their
favored items — or pledge not to cancel their favored items — in return
for their support on other, unrelated matters. The President’s threat to
cancel, or promise not to cancel, items of importance to legislators or to
outside groups could be used to increase his leverage to advance policies
unrelated to the budget, such as support for his nominees, for regulatory
legislation, or even for foreign treaties.
These effects were recently discussed by a former staff
director of the House Appropriations Committee, who testified —
There is no question that a nexus has developed between campaign fund-raising
and the community that advocates on behalf of earmarks. The more earmarks a
Senator or Congressman is able to win for a local university, hospital, city
government or art museum, the more lobbyists he may expect to find in attendance
at his fund-raisers. … Earmarks are increasingly used to persuade members to
support legislation that they might otherwise oppose or oppose legislation that
they might support. In the House this practice is now being extended to the
granting of earmarks in one piece of legislation in return for a member’s vote
on unrelated legislation. Chairman Thomas joked openly about the delay in
consideration of the highway bill last summer so that the leadership could gain
more support for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.[11]
Some would maintain that H.R. 4890 is intended to be a
partial cure for these diseases. But it could just as easily aggravate the
diseases by giving the President an easier and more direct way to play the
game. The premise of the proposal seems to be that the President will be
less political, less interested in rounding up votes for policy
issues, nomination, and other proposals, and less interested than Members
of Congress in securing the financial and political support of outside groups
for such purposes. Would that really be the case? Norman Ornstein, of the
American Enterprise Institute, thinks not.
[T]he Republicans have rejected the one
device that has been proved in the past to bring fiscal discipline, the
pay-as-you-go provisions that governed fiscal policy through the golden years in
the 1990s. Instead, they are pushing a sham version of the line-item veto,
basically just a sharply enhanced rescission authority for the president.
Congress would pass its spending bills, the president would pluck out items he
did not like and send them back to Congress to vote on them again.
Leave aside the simple abdication of
responsibility by Congress here — the refusal to set up a provision to have
separate votes on earmarks or related items before any bill gets to the
president, and the basic message of “stop us before we spend again.” The larger
reality is that this gives the president a great additional mischief-making
capability, to pluck out items to punish lawmakers he doesn’t like, or to
threaten individual lawmakers to get votes on other things, without having any
noticeable impact on budget growth or restraint.[12]
End Notes:
[1]
The text of the proposal is available at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/pubpress/2006/line_item_veto.pdf.
[2]
Statement of Donald B. Marron, Acting Director, Congressional Budget
Office, before the Subcommittee on the Legislative and Budget Process,
House Rules Committee, March 15, 2006, available at
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/70xx/doc7079/03-15-LineItemVeto.pdf.
[3]
The appropriations provided for most programs expire at the end of the
fiscal year in question. In such cases, any funds that have not been
obligated by September 30 revert to the Treasury. (If the line-item
veto legislation were enacted, it is possible that Congress would
respond by lengthening the period of time for which appropriations for
various programs would remain available, but it is unclear whether
Congress would do so.)
[4]
Statement of Rep. Paul Ryan before the Subcommittee on the Legislative
and Budget Process, House Rules Committee, March 15, 2006.
[5]
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, “special income tax
provisions are referred to as tax expenditures because they may be
considered analogous to direct outlay programs, and the two can be
considered as alternative means of accomplishing similar budget
policies. Tax expenditures are similar to those direct spending
programs that are available as entitlements to those who meet the
statutory criteria established for the programs.” See Joint Committee
on Taxation, “Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures for Fiscal Years
2005-2009,” January 12, 2005, p. 2. This equivalence is why former
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has referred to these tax breaks
as “tax entitlements.”
[6]
Testimony of Donald B. Marron, op.cit.
[7]
George Will, “The Vexing Qualities of a Veto,” in the Washington Post,
March 16, 2006, page A23.
[8]
Louis Fisher, “Item Veto: Budgetary Savings,” Congressional Research
Service, May 26, 2005,
[9]
Jonathan Nicholson, “Precursor to Line-Item ‘Veto’ Failed to Restrain
Prior Spending, GAO Says,” Bureau of National Affairs, Daily Tax
Report, March 13, 2006, p. G-6.
[10]
Testimony of Donald B. Marron, op.cit.
[11] The highway bill was a cornucopia of
earmarked projects. The testimony was by Scott Lilly before the
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information,
and International Security, Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, March 16, 2006.
[12]
Norm Ornstein, Three Embarrassments in an All-Around Shameful
Congress, American Enterprise Institute, April 5, 2006, at
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.social,pubID.24163/pub_detail.asp.
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