Although President Clinton did not use his line item veto pen widely this year, a key critic said he remains convinced Congress was "stupid" in granting the president the new power.
"It is a profoundly stupid and really corrosive thing for Congress to have done to itself," Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., said in an interview Monday.
Skaggs was one of the legislators who filed suit challenging the line item veto; the Supreme Court earlier this year said Skaggs and the others did not have proper standing to sue and did not decide the constitutional issue.
Skaggs acknowledged that after vetoing 38 projects in the Military Construction bill, Clinton used the power more sparingly, but added the initial use of the veto served the president's purpose.
"The MilCon bill was, in effect, a test of a nuclear device - that he had it and he knew how to use it," Skaggs said. Those vetoes succeeded in "changing the strategic relationship" between Congress and the White House, Skaggs said, adding that the real test will come in how appropriators write funding bills in future years and whether the president uses it for "leveraging and extorting" members on nonfunding issues.
Skaggs said Clinton and members used the line item veto as leverage during consideration of legislation to grant the president fast track trade negotiating authority, contending that, based on press reports, he believes some members used it to try to insulate their projects.
Skaggs again said the new power will not result in spending cuts. "The way this town resolves disputes is not for everyone to give something, but for everyone to get something," he said.
And legislators should not have been surprised they could find no pattern in how the president used the new power. "In our wisdom, we gave him no standards, so why did we expect him to use any?" he asked.
Skaggs said he still believes the Supreme Court will overturn the line item veto.
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