Oh this is nice. While, um… “researching” that last article, I ran across a tidbit regarding an ethics reform bill in the Senate. While the House passed theirs 430-1 (Rep Dan Burton, R-IN, was the only one to oppose it), the Senate’s has been filibustered, but not for the reason you might think.
Republicans demanded that before the Senate vote on the reform measure, it consider a proposed amendment to permit a “line item veto,” which would allow a president to single out specific spending or tax provisions in bills approved by Congress and ask that lawmakers go back and delete them.
It would allow a president to single out all kinds of things in bills. In a poorly written article from about a year ago I tackled why the line-item veto should never come back, but it’s fairly simple.
Here’s the way the line-item veto works: Congress passes a bill, president vetoes a few items and sends it back for a vote again. If it doesn’t pass in its new form by a simple majority, it goes back in its original form, where it can be vetoed in the regular manner and need a 2/3 majority. This was voted 6-3 unconstitutional back in 1996 when Clinton held the power (before you read too much into that, both the very conservative Antonin Scalia and the more liberal Stephen Breyer dissented, as well as Sandra Day O’Conner) .
I agree with Reid’s response to the proposed amendment:
“Attaching an unrelated measure to this bipartisan bill is an obvious attempt to derail passage of the strongest ethics reform legislation” in three decades, Sens. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Barack Obama of Illinois said in a statement.
That about sums it up. The Democrats want to bring about ethics reform, the Republicans want to expand presidential power.
