Line-item veto

"Line item" redirects here. For line items in accounting and bookkeeping, see General ledger and Financial statement.

The line-item veto, or partial veto, is a special form of veto that authorizes a chief executive to reject particular provisions of a bill enacted by a legislature without vetoing the entire bill. Many countries have different standards for invoking the line-item veto, if it exists at all. Each country and/or state has its own particular requirement for overriding a line-item veto.

Line-item veto by country

Brazil

The President of Brazil has the power of the line-item veto over all legislation. Any provisions vetoed in such a manner are returned to the Brazilian congress, and can be overridden by a vote. Recently, the President of Brazil vetoed portions of a new forestry law which had been criticized as potentially causing another wave of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

Panama

The President of Panama has the ability to partially veto portions of a bill.

United States

Federal government

Numerous attempts have been made at the Federal level to grant the president line-item veto power, beginning with President Ulysses S. Grant after the American Civil War. In nearly all cases, Presidential requests for the granting of the line-item veto have been met rejected by Congress. Ronald Reagan said to Congress in his 1986 State of the Union address, "Tonight I ask you to give me what forty-three governors have: Give me a line-item veto this year. Give me the authority to veto waste, and I'll take the responsibility, I'll make the cuts, I'll take the heat." Bill Clinton echoed the request in his State of the Union address in 1995.

The President was briefly granted this power by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, passed by the Congress to control "pork barrel spending" that favors a particular region rather than the nation as a whole. The line-item veto was used 82 times in 11 Bills from the federal budget by President Clinton.

However, United States District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled on February 12, 1998, that unilateral amendment or repeal of only parts of statutes violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998, by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court in the case Clinton v. City of New York. The case was brought by the then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Since then, the prospect of granting the President a line-item veto has occasionally resurfaced in Congress; either through a constitutional amendment or a differently-worded bill. Most recently, the House of Representatives passed a bill on February 8, 2012, that would have granted the President a limited line-item veto; however, the bill was not heard in the Senate.

The most-commonly proposed form of the line-item veto, including the version passed in 1996, is limited to partial vetoes of spending bills, for the purpose of reducing the deficit by eliminating unnecessary provisions from spending bills.

Confederate States of America

While the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was largely based on the U.S. Constitution, one of the most notable departures was the granting of a line-item veto to the President. Jefferson Davis, however, never exercised the provision.

State governments

Forty-three states - all except Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont — give their governors some form of line-item veto power. The Mayor of Washington, D.C. also has this power. Use of the line-item veto remains far less controversial at the state level than at the federal level.

See also

• Line-item veto in the United States