Once in a blue moon in American politics a new law works almost precisely as intended. Such has been the case — at least so far — with the line-item veto. This year President Clinton has used his new budget-cutting tool to execute scores of white-elephant congressional spending projects, saving taxpayers an estimated $2 billion over five years. Virtually none of these projects were in the national interest.
Ironically, it is this early success of the line-item veto that may prove its undoing. Congress, it turns out, likes the line-item veto far better in theory than in practice. Sen. Trent Lott concedes that there are fewer Republican supporters of the line-item veto today than there were this time last year. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens complains that Clinton’s line-item vetoes have been a “raw abuse of power.” Stevens is threatening to push for the veto’s repeal. Robert Livingston, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, charges that President Clinton is using the veto as “a raw exercise of power meant to threaten and intimidate.”
What is giving congressional Republicans heartburn is that the veto is being used by a Democratic President to trim hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of lard from the budget, and some of it is Republican lard. So far, Clinton has used the veto to eliminate funding for a $600,000 solar waste-water treatment project in Vermont; a $2‑million Chena River dredging project in Fairbanks, Alaska, to benefit a single tour-boat operator; a $1‑million corporate-welfare grant to the Chamber of Commerce in Carter County, Montana; $900,000 for a Veterans Administration cemetery the VA says it doesn’t need; $1.9 million for dredging a Mississippi lake that primarily serves yachts and pleasure boats. It is precisely oinkers like these that enraged the public and led to enactment of the line-item veto in the first place.
In fact, the only legitimate complaint about Bill Clinton’s use of this veto is that he has done it too sparingly. This year’s Energy and Water bill alone contains 423 unrequested projects — conveniently, just about one for every district.
Clinton canceled just 8 of them; most of the other 415 deserved the same fate. If, as President Clinton has suggested, the criteria for wielding this veto power are that the program in question is one that should be funded at the local level if at all, or that it has costs that exceed public benefits, then the savings could be orders of magnitude higher than the $2 billion achieved so far.