Chenoweth Gets Line-Item Veto Support Lawmaker’S Stand Proves To Be Correct, High Court Rules

Helen Chenoweth’s lonely stand against the presidential line-item veto was vindicated Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 decision, the high court ruled the Constitution doesn’t allow what, in effect, are partial vetoes.

Chenoweth was one of four members of the U.S. House to vote against giving the president the veto, one of the 10 tenets of the Republican Contract with America. That probably prompted House Speaker Newt Gingrich to snub Chenoweth at a 1996 Idaho fund-raiser he had promised to attend, Chenoweth said.

“Immediately I was on the leadership’s radar screen,” Chenoweth said. “It’s a time you swallow hard and make the right vote.”

Republicans pushed the line-item veto as a means of eliminating wasteful spending projects routinely attached to larger bills. But Chenoweth said the move gave the executive branch too much power.

“We must find aggressive ways to cut the unnecessary pork, but we should not abandon the Constitution in the process,” she said.

Chenoweth said she will attempt to restore the president’s recision authority. That allowed a president to tell Congress he would sign a bill with particular items deleted and Congress then voted on the bill again, she said.

Congress eliminated the presidential recision authority in the Nixon years, Chenoweth said.

The National Taxpayers Union says the Supreme Court decision only protects pork.

“We think it will effectively exclude the president from cutting waste from mammoth spending bills,” said Pete Sepp of the Taxpayers Union.

“Since the 1970s, Congress has increasingly resorted to handing (the president) huge spending proposals. It’s the classic dilemma - he can veto it because of a few spending provisions he doesn’t like or hold his nose and sign it.”

Congress created the Constitutional imbalance of power, in its own favor, “when it gave the president this dilemma,” Sepp said.

An Idaho group filed one of two lawsuits that elicited the Supreme Court decision. The Snake River Potato Growers sued over Clinton’s veto of a tax measure that would have allowed agricultural processors to escape capital-gains taxes when they sell processing plants to farmers’ cooperatives.

Idaho Republicans also howled when Clinton used the line-item veto to ax $13 million in construction at Mountain Home Air Force Base.

On the next-to-last day of the session, the court also:

Ruled that a person carrying HIV is covered by a disability anti-bias law even if there are no symptoms of AIDS.

Held, in a case growing out of the death of White House aide Vincent Foster, that the attorney-client privilege extends even after the death of the client.

Said that government withholding of cash grants from artists whose work is deemed indecent does not violate the artists’ free-speech rights.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.