Trump Wants a 'Line-Item Veto' on Budget Bills. That Was Ruled Unconstitutional 20 Years Ago.
Been there, tried that.
Well, it's done. After his will-I-or-won't-I-sign-this antics this morning, President Donald Trump has signed the $1.3 trillion spending bill that passed the House of Representatives last night.
But Trump being Trump, he wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to air his many grievances with Congress, Frank Costanza–style. And he's got a lot of problems with you people.
Among the president's laundry list of complaints was that the bill contains too many random and unnecessary expenses. He's absolutely right, though the gripe rings awfully hollow coming from the one man on earth who was actually in a position to stop the budget from becoming law.
Trump's solution, unsurprisingly, was to give more power to Trump. Congress, he said, should pass a law granting the president a "line-item veto" over budget bills—that is, the power to strike out individual appropriations rather than having to choose between accepting or rejecting the bill wholesale.
A bold, innovative idea for streamlining American governance? Not exactly.
Way back in 1996, a Republican* Congress tried to do just that, passing the Line Item Veto Act in the hopes of giving then-President Bill Clinton the power to excise specific appropriations from the federal budget.
The act passed, but it didn't last long. In 1997, the City of New York and a number of health care companies who had lost funding to one of Clinton's line-item vetoes sued, arguing that the law impermissibly blurred the Constitution's separation of the legislative and executive functions of government. The Supreme Court agreed, holding in 1998's Clinton v. City of New York that the line-item veto violated the Presentment Clause, which is the portion of the Constitution which lays out the veto process. In essence, the Court said, Congress cannot delegate its constitutional power to craft and modify legislation to the executive.
Clinton v. New York isn't as universally known as Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education, but it isn't exactly obscure. It's a landmark case in U.S. constitutional law, a cornerstone of the "nondelegation doctrine" that underpins many past and ongoing debates about the structure of American government. If you went to high school after 1998, you've probably at least heard of it once.
If so, congratulations. You're apparently better informed on the structure of the U.S. government than the president.
*Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the 1996 Congress was majority Democrat.