Republicans draw line on veto power

In the arsenal of budget-cutting weapons revered by fiscal conservatives, few are as prized as the line-item veto -- a tool sought by presidents back to Ulysses S. Grant and made popular by Republican icon Ronald Reagan.

That is why, when many conservatives are bitterly disappointed in President Bush for allowing the federal budget to burgeon, GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani have found themselves engaged in an increasingly noisy debate over their commitment to the line-item veto.

Some voters may see the fight as turning on an arcane point of budgeting, but among the Republican faithful, the veto power is seen by many as a litmus test for candidates’ commitment to smaller government.

“I like vetoes,” Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, said in a television ad earlier this year. “I’ve vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor. And frankly, I can’t wait to get my hands on Washington!”

Romney is not only bragging about how many times he used such a veto, but he also is attacking Giuliani for spearheading a successful 1997 lawsuit while New York mayor to deprive the president of a federal line-item veto.

The issue provided the sharpest point of tension in a debate among GOP candidates Tuesday, and it marks one of Romney’s most aggressive efforts yet to undermine Giuliani’s claim to be a champion of fiscal discipline.

“Fiscal conservatives are looking for someone who will step up and really demonstrate they would control spending in the White House,” said Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. “They were disappointed in the Republican Congress and in President Bush because spending exploded, as did pork-barrel projects, on their watch.”

At issue is a central tenet of GOP orthodoxy: Presidents and governors should have the power to veto individual spending and tax provisions of legislation to excise items from bills that they consider wasteful. Reagan made a big push for that power. Republicans kept arguing for it as part of their “contract with America,” the manifesto that propelled the party to power in Congress in 1994.

Like more than 40 governors, Romney had line-item veto power when he was governor of Massachusetts, and he says he wielded it 844 times during his four years in office. But he was up against a Democratic-controlled Legislature, which overturned him more often than not. According to an analysis by the Boston Globe, the Legislature restored the money cut through every one of Romney’s line-item vetoes during his last year in office.

Critics said Romney went through the exercise of using the line-item veto to curry favor with fiscal conservatives as he went about building his national political credentials.

Democrat Salvatore F. DiMasi, who became speaker of the Massachusetts House toward the end of Romney’s term, said Romney did not even bother to lobby state lawmakers in support of his vetoes.

“It plays out well in national politics, but if you are closer to the situation, you see how empty those vetoes are,” said Thomas J. Whalen, a social scientist at Boston University.

At the federal level, ironically, Republicans finally won approval of the line-item veto in 1996, when Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president.

Giuliani has said he challenged the law as a matter of legal principle. “The line-item veto is unconstitutional,” he said in the Tuesday debate held in Dearborn, Mich. “I took Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court and beat Bill Clinton. It’s unconstitutional. What the heck can you do about that if you’re a strict constructionist?”

But at the time he filed it, the lawsuit was a matter of immediate, financial consequence for New York City.

One of Clinton’s first line-item vetoes was of a provision in a 1997 budget bill that would have helped New York state finance its Medicaid program by taxing hospitals and other healthcare providers.

Clinton said he vetoed the measure because the tax arrangement would have given New York an advantage over other states in raising its share of Medicaid costs. As a result of the veto, New York City stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The president’s use of the line-item veto in this instance is detrimental to the efforts of the city and its healthcare partners. . . to provide maximum healthcare benefits to needy individuals,” Giuliani said when he joined forces with city union and hospital leaders to file suit against the veto.

Giuliani took the case to the Supreme Court -- and won. In 1998, the court struck down the veto, saying it allowed the president to rewrite laws he had signed, unconstitutionally stealing power from the legislative branch.

During his campaign, Giuliani has said he supports a line-item veto but that he believes it can only be enacted through a constitutional amendment. In Tuesday’s debate, however, he cast his challenge to the 1997 law as a form of constituent service.

“As the mayor of New York, if I had let President Clinton take $250 million away from the people of my city illegally and unconstitutionally, I wouldn’t have been much of a mayor,” he said.

In spotlighting this little-known chapter of Giuliani’s mayoralty, Romney is opening a new front in his efforts to cast doubt on Giuliani’s conservative credentials: He has also accused Giuliani of coddling illegal immigrants while he was mayor and has raised questions about Giuliani’s liberal record on abortion rights and gun control.

Some Republicans say, however, that it may be harder for Romney to undercut Giuliani’s credentials among economic conservatives, because his record of reducing taxes and spending in New York has drawn praise.

“Giuliani has a good story to tell: He cut taxes a lot in a hostile political environment,” said Pat Toomey, president of the conservative Club for Growth. “It’s understandable that Romney would look for something [like the line-item veto] that would cut against that. It suggests a little chink in Giuliani’s armor.”

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janet.hook@latimes.com

Times staff writer James Rainey contributed to this report.