Supreme Court Rejects Clinton’s Line-Item Veto

The Supreme Court struck down the line-item veto Thursday, declaring that the Constitution does not allow the president to cancel spending items once he has signed them into law.

The 6-3 decision ends a brief constitutional experiment designed to reduce wasteful spending that had been championed by both congressional Republicans and President Clinton.

The Line Item Veto Act cannot stand, the justices said, because the Constitution sets one mechanism, and one only, for turning bills into law.

Both the House and Senate must pass a bill, and the president must sign it. At that point, the entire bill takes effect and becomes law. The Line Item Veto Act amended that process by giving the president new power to cancel some parts of a bill.

This “new procedure . . . is not authorized by the Constitution,” the court said. Regardless of its wisdom, the line-item veto is invalid unless the Constitution is amended, the justices said.

Though the ruling preserves the traditional balance of power between Capitol Hill and the White House, both congressional Republicans and President Clinton expressed dismay.

The line-item veto thus becomes the second of the Republicans’ government reform ideas to die at the Supreme Court.

When the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, they vowed to enact term limits for federal lawmakers as well as the line-item veto. Both changes have now been struck down as unconstitutional by the high court.

The Constitution sets no limits on how long those elected to Congress may serve, the court said in 1995, and no state may change that. And now, the court has ruled that the Constitution permits no change in the basic procedures for enacting a bill into law.

“This is a bad decision,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), noting that 83% of the public supported the idea in an opinion poll. “We need the Line Item Veto Act to restore balance to the federal budget process.”

President Clinton, the first beneficiary of the new power, also regretted the outcome.

“The decision is a defeat for all Americans,” he said in a statement from China. “It deprives the president of a valuable tool for eliminating waste in the federal budget and for enlivening the public debate over how to make the best use of public funds.”

The president’s aides said they had not decided whether to try again in another form to enact a type of line-item veto.

McCain and Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), however, wasted no time in introducing yet another line-item veto bill.

And while opponents of the veto immediately discounted as impractical the latest effort to get around the constitutional issues, the bigger obstacle to further action on the issue may be political. The veto was passed in the first heady months of Republican rule in Congress and its proponents saw it as a powerful new tool to help balance the budget.

Now, however, the budget is balanced and pressure to cut spending has significantly diminished. And many Republicans were markedly less enthusiastic about the idea once Clinton started using it to veto their own home-state projects.

Meanwhile, veteran Democrats on Capitol Hill were celebrating the court’s decision. “Today brings to a close a long struggle, a long battle,” said Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the silver-haired West Virginian who led opposition to the bill. “God save this honorable court,” he proclaimed.

Last year, Byrd was less enamored of the Supreme Court. It threw out his original lawsuit challenging the line-item veto on grounds that he had no legal standing to sue. As a lawmaker, he did not suffer a personal injury in the case and therefore had no right to go to court, the justices ruled then.

But the issue came back to the court this year in two lawsuits, one from New York officials, who suffered a loss of federal health care funds, and another from Idaho potato growers, who lost a tax benefit.

New York City officials had owed the federal government $2.6 billion for Medicaid spending until Congress canceled the debt in a spending bill last August.

However, Clinton exercised his line-item veto power and killed the provision. City officials sued.

Similarly, the potato growers formed a cooperative and persuaded Congress to ease the capital gains tax for people who would sell them processing and storage facilities. Clinton canceled that, too, prompting the farmers to sue.

According to an analysis prepared by Byrd, Clinton exercised the veto to strike 82 spending items that would have cost $937 million over the next five years. Congress overturned the veto of 39 of those items. The high court’s ruling invalidates all the vetoes.

A federal judge here combined the New York and Idaho lawsuits and struck down the law earlier this year.

For its part, the Supreme Court struggled over the question of whether the New York officials and the potato growers had suffered a direct injury.

Justice John Paul Stevens devoted 17 pages of his 31-page majority opinion to that question.

But once that issue had been decided, the majority quickly concluded that the act was unconstitutional.

“In both legal and practical effect, the president has amended two acts of Congress by repealing a portion of each,” said Stevens, referring to the changes affecting New York and the potato growers. “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend or to repeal statutes.”

His opinion in the combined case (Clinton vs. City of New York, 97-1374), was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O’Connor, appointees of President Reagan, dissented, along with Clinton appointee Stephen G. Breyer.

Scalia read much of his dissent from the bench and argued that, since the nation’s founding, chief executives have spent less than the amounts appropriated by Congress. This is not a radical idea, he said, but the bill’s sponsors made it sound so by calling it a “veto act.”

The unfortunate title of the bill “has succeeded in faking out the Supreme Court,” he complained.

The line-item veto has long been an article of faith among conservatives. Republicans have touted it as a way to curb wasteful, pork-barrel spending. It was a key element of the “contract with America,” the conservative manifesto on which Republicans campaigned and won control of Congress in 1994.

But the veto was a direct attack on lawmakers’ power to spend money as they saw fit. Its leading critics were staunch defenders of the prerogatives of the legislative branch and they exulted over Thursday’s court ruling.

Reaction from both sides on Capitol Hill was swift.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob L. Livingston (R-La.), whose panel’s power to write spending bills was challenged by the veto, announced the court’s decision at a morning meeting of the committee. Democrats cheered while Republicans remained largely silent.

“The Supreme Court saved Congress from itself on this one,” said Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash.), a senior member of the committee. “This is the end of the line-item veto.”

Proponents of the veto insisted that they were bloodied but not bowed, and would push for a new form of line-item veto that would not have the constitutional infirmities of the law that the court struck down.

The bill introduced Thursday by McCain and Coats would provide for every spending bill Congress passes to be broken up into individual items before being sent to the president, allowing him to veto any item as a separate bill.

Critics said that the idea is impractical and cumbersome because it would require each of the 13 massive appropriation measures to be split into hundreds or thousands of separate bills. McCain and Coats insisted that modern computer technology would make it work.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.