Drawing the Line With the Line Item : Senate devises clever approach to thorny issue

The 104th Congress has sought in two ways to pass the fiscal-responsibility buck. The barely rejected balanced-budget amendment tried to pass it to the judiciary; the line-item veto bill, approved by the House and, in a different form, approved Thursday in the Senate, seeks to pass it to the executive.

If the House accepts the constitutionally safer Senate version, large bills will be sent to the President divided into smaller bills, enabling him to veto those bills he dislikes. The Senate bill’s drafters think no other approach would pass constitutional muster.

So is the Senate approach a subversion of the Constitution? A clever ruse? More accurately, it’s a counter-ruse. The bundling of wildly disparate measures into omnibus bills has itself become a way to outsmart the Constitution and circumvent the veto. When smelly political favors come packaged with needed legislation, the President tends to hold his nose and sign. Congress could, of course, do for itself much what the line-item veto asks the President to do simply by considering each measure separately on its merits.

Instead, Congress is asking the President to do that job for it, but better the President than, by collective default, nobody. And since the Senate views tax breaks as being like government expenditures such as appropriations, the upper chamber has produced a far tougher bill than the House did, one that places only the broadest tax cuts beyond the President’s reach. Under the Senate’s version, the President could veto a welfare bonanza. He could also veto a capital gains tax cut.

What is the House Republicans’ top priority, balancing the budget or cutting taxes? The line-item veto compromise worked out in the Senate calls this question in a new way. It remains to be seen whether Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) will accept a compromise that owes much to Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) or, instead, will hold out for a bill that preserves pork so long as it comes in the form of a tax favor rather than an appropriation.

Procedural difficulties may well arise if the cumbersome Senate version becomes law. How finely will legislation be sliced before being sent to the White House? Who will do the slicing? Will every bill be sliced, or only some? Do decisions on these matters require congressional approval? If so, are we not, in a way, back where we started from?

These are serious questions, and yet, on balance, the Senate version of the line-item veto is worth a try. What Congress has given, Congress can always take back. Though the measure is not without risk, the risk is justified in view of the enormous benefit that would be achieved by bringing the federal budget, at last, under some semblance of control. Almost any line-item veto mechanism, however clumsy, should help.