Senate Approves Line-Item Veto To Curb Spending Clinton Eager To Sign Historic, Controversial Power Shift Into Law

By an overwhelming majority, the Senate voted on Wednesday night to cede much of Congress’ authority over federal spending to the White House beginning next year.

The historic legislation, a central part of Republican dogma, is sure to be passed by the House within days and to be signed by President Clinton, who supports it without reservation, as have all his recent predecessors. But equally certain is the prospect that its constitutionality will be immediately challenged in court.

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 31, would give the president what is known as a line-item veto - the power to strike out specific parts of spending bills and some tax measures passed by Congress without vetoing the entire legislation.

In an assessment that went unchallenged, Sen. Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and one of the three Republicans who voted against the bill, called it “the greatest effort to shift the balance of power to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the Supreme Court.”

But the Republican sponsors said that Congress had proved itself unable to control excessive spending, and that the president needed this new tool to bring the budget under control.

By allowing the national debt to grow to nearly $5 trillion, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., “It is Congress that has failed the American people.”

Presidents, McCain continued, have been able to escape responsibility with the excuse that they were forced to sign wasteful spending measures because they were part of a larger bill that they wanted to become law.

“Under a line-item veto,” he said, “no one can hide.”

But this was one of the rare occasions in the Senate when the day was carried oratorically, both sides conceded, by a senator on the losing side.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, ever the defender of congressional prerogatives, held the floor for two hours with a monologue he had spent weeks preparing in which he alluded to the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, the British Empire and the framing of the U.S. Constitution.

Referring only rarely to notes, he quoted verbatim from the Bible and Aristotle, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Paradise Lost, from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Aaron Burr and Daniel Webster.

His once coal-black hair turned snow-white, his once powerful hands now shaky, Byrd, a 78-year-old Democrat, has lost none of his voice and, after 37 years in the Senate, none of his passion for Congress.

“It is ludicrous - nay, it is tragic - that we are about to substitute our own judgment for that of the Framers with respect to the control of the purse and the need to check the executive,” he declared. “Yet, that is precisely what we are about to do here today. We are about to succumb, for political reasons only, to the mania which has taken hold of some in this and the other body to put that most political of political inventions, the Contract With America, into law.”

The line-item veto was indeed one of the top items in the Contract, the platform for Republicans who ran for and won control of Congress two years ago.

The House and Senate passed separate versions of the measure early last year. But then the matter was laid aside, partly because of differences among Republicans but mostly because they were reluctant to give such new authority to a Democratic president.

Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, who hopes to be president himself next year, got the measure back on track this month.

In addition to Hatfield, the Republicans who voted against the measure were William S. Cohen of Maine and James R. Jeffords of Vermont.

The bill adopted by conferees from the Senate and House and approved by the Senate on Wednesday night would go into effect on Jan. 1, 1997. It would allow the president to cancel specific items of spending in appropriations bills and tax breaks that applied to no more than 100 taxpayers.

Congress would be free to pass new legislation disapproving the cancellation. But the president could then veto that legislation, and it would require a two-thirds vote of both chambers to override the veto and retain the particular spending or tax item that the president opposed.

The legislation will be challenged in court on the ground that the Constitution allows the president to veto whole bills but not parts of bills. Article I, Section 7 provides for bills approved by Congress to be sent to the president and then declares, “If he approves, he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it.”

Initially, the Republicans promised a constitutional amendment. But the sponsors of the legislation were afraid they could not get the requisite two-thirds vote of both chambers and the approval of the legislatures of three-quarters of the states. In any event, they were too impatient to wait for that to happen.

So they agreed that the worst that could happen if a bill were passed would be that the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional and that the lawmakers could then go the route of a constitutional amendment.