President Clinton decided not to use his line item veto power to delete any provisions from the Labor-HHS funding bill. The bill was signed last Thursday, and Wednesday was the deadline for any vetoes Clinton may have wanted to apply to it.
A list of possible veto candidates circulating within the administration in recent days had included four or five items, all of which remained untouched.
The price tag for the measures that had been considered amounted to "not a whole lot of money," one administration source said. The official added the Labor-HHS bill was less ripe with veto bait because it contains many of the administration's own priorities.
"On that bill, we're usually fighting for more," the official said. "There's a lot of spending on job training and education that we support. The main challenge is to keep certain types of riders off the bill." The measure also contains much nondiscretionary spending normally not subject to the line item veto, the official indicated.
But Senate Commerce Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., today said the president had a variety of "egregious" items he could have chosen in the Labor-HHS bill. McCain, chief Senate sponsor of the line item veto law, said conferees on Labor-HHS included specific earmarks of education research funds totaling some $14.5 million for such programs as school construction in Iowa and museums in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago. House Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Edward Porter, R-Ill., represents a district in the Chicago suburbs, while Philadelphia is the hometown of Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
In addition, McCain said the conference agreement earmarks $1.5 million for construction at the University of Arkansas, funding for the Meharry Medical School in Tennessee and money to "digitize" the card catalog of a medical library in Pennsylvania.
McCain listed conference agreement earmarks he said were made without "benefit of the normal, merit-based review process that would ensure that these are the highest priority uses for the funding provided in this bill." His list includes grants for a "regional information infrastructure" in the mid-Atlantic states, $8 million to expand the Iowa Communication Network, $3 million for Empire State College in New York and $5 million for a demonstration project in the Delaware Valley region of Pennsylvania.
McCain has sent letters to Clinton on each funding bill, pointing out specific earmarks he believes were not properly reviewed before being funded.
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