Lean meat
Line-item veto can trim congressional fat

In a rare turn of events, the congressional pork barrel has passed the knife in order to trim its own fat.

That's right -- the executive butcher is primed and ready to slice and dice with the newly passed line-item veto. Of course, such a measure has its detractors, but the federal government must remember that any attempt to cut the pork is a justified one.

The bill is part of the Republican Contract with America, and the Grand Old Party has been pushing for this type of big-time reform for more than a decade. Needless expenditures are now quietly slipped into otherwise virtuous bills, and the president might be hesitant to veto a bill because of only one small part. The effect is that taxpayers foot the bill for unnecessary projects that are discreetly hid from the executive branch. The sheer length of today's legislation and the complicated time-consuming process of a bill's passage seriously hinders executive veto power.

The Republican-dominated Congress has voluntarily shifted more power to the president, allowing the executive branch to veto single items in a larger bill in order to trim the fat. Congress will still retain the power to overturn the veto with a two-thirds majority vote, but the biting reality is that those votes will be next to impossible.

Questions still surround the reasoning behind the Republican action. The fact that a majority congressional party would willingly give power of the purse to a Democrat president can be reasoned by the knowledge that the Republicans see one of their own occupying the White House in 1996.

No matter what party is in the White House or on Capitol Hill, the veto power of the president as drafted by the Constitution was a power given in a much simpler time. As bills have become longer and more complex throughout American history, the need for greater leeway in veto power has become necessary.

That move only proves that the pork barrel status quo has become unacceptable. Detractors insist that the line-item veto will give the president too much power to push a political agenda, or to use the bill as a type of blackmail. Another criticism is that the bill is unconstitutional, and an attempt to crush the measure in the judiciary wing will eventually occur.

But the reality is that the bureaucracy has become bloated to the point where Congress is ready to admit it needs help trimming its own fat -- which will in turn lower the budget, a main part of the Republican agenda. By using the executive branch as an ally and not an enemy, the federal government has a rare opportunity to slim down. But of course there is always the problem of keeping the fat off of future legislation.