The Line-Item Veto: Restoring Presidential Judgment and Curbing a Spendthrift Congress

The most important word the President of the United States can utter is not a stirring call to duty or a soaring appeal to our better angels. It is a quiet, constitutional "No." The veto is the executive's oldest and most durable shield against legislative overreach, placed in the Constitution by men who understood that liberty requires a government strong enough to check itself. But if you watch how Washington actually operates, you quickly see that the veto has been bludgeoned into a political cudgel that almost nobody dares to swing. Congress has learned to capture it, neutralize it, and make it functionally useless for the very purpose Alexander Hamilton had in mind. What we get is not a republic of deliberate judgment but a feeding trough where the only thing harder to stop than a single bad law is the thousand-page "must-pass" bill that smuggles in a dozen of them.

I want to examine a unique, rarely discussed flaw in our constitutional machinery: the Framers would be horrified by what the omnibus appropriations process has done to the veto, and the single best remedy - a line-item veto - is perfectly consistent with the original design of our republic. It just requires something more durable than a statute. It demands a constitutional amendment that restores the president's judgment, not his raw power.

The Shield That Became a Hostage

Read Federalist No. 73, where Hamilton explains the veto clause. He does not frame it as a weapon for an ambitious executive to bend the legislature to his will. He calls it a "shield" - a defensive tool to protect the executive department from legislative encroachment and, more crucially, to protect the people from bad laws. Hamilton knew that "the propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments" was a permanent fixture of human nature. That is the constrained vision Thomas Sowell writes about: legislators are not disinterested public servants; they are fallible men and women who, when handed power unchecked, will use it to benefit themselves and their factions at the public's expense.

The Constitution, as written, gives the president an all-or-nothing veto of an entire bill. That design worked sensibly when legislation was brief and narrow. An 18th-century enactment might run a couple of pages and address one subject. Today, the "must-pass" spending bills that keep the government's lights on are thousands of pages long, laced with the pet projects, corporate giveaways, and ideological riders of 535 members. The president who objects to a single line faces a binary choice: sign the whole bloated thing and swallow billions in waste, or veto it all and invite a government shutdown - a manufactured crisis that the media and Congress will promptly blame on him, not on the legislators who wrote the mess. This is not a design feature. It is a loophole. Logrolling, the ancient practice of bundling unrelated measures to build a majority, has overwhelmed the veto. A determined minority can hold the Treasury hostage to its own parochial demands because the president cannot strike a single line. He cannot carve out the million-dollar grant for a teapot museum or the sweetheart regulatory loophole for a favored industry while approving the paychecks for the troops. He must swallow it whole or starve everyone. The veto, far from being the guardian of liberty Hamilton envisioned, has become a hostage-taking device where the only prudent course is surrender.

The Seen and Unseen Costs

This is where an economist's lens sharpens the argument. Henry Hazlitt taught us that all sound public policy rests on one lesson: look at the unseen consequences, not merely the visible ones. When Congress passes a gargantuan omnibus, the visible benefit is the ribbon-cutting photo op in some representative's district, the temporary local jobs, the gleaming new infrastructure that a grateful constituency can touch and see. The unseen cost is distributed across 330 million people in ways no camera captures: higher taxes tomorrow, a larger deficit that fuels inflation, the small business that cannot expand because a regulatory rider tilted the playing field, the young family that watches the price of eggs climb as the dollar is steadily debased.

With an all-or-nothing veto, every one of those unseen costs gets locked inside a political safe that no one can open. The president cannot surgically remove the worst of them without destroying the entire funding structure. He cannot say, "This bridge to nowhere is an insult to the taxpayer, but I will sign the rest." He cannot apply the moral logic that Milton Friedman spent a lifetime championing: a dollar that Congress spends is a dollar that cannot be spent by the citizen who earned it. Friedman's case for free markets rested on the conviction that individuals, not distant legislators, are the best stewards of their own resources. The broken veto process undercuts that principle by ensuring that the vast machinery of government spending is never forced to justify itself line by line in the harsh light of public scrutiny. Instead, the president's judgment is degraded into a rubber stamp. He is robbed of the ability to make discriminating choices, which is the very essence of responsible executive power.

Why a Statute Will Not Fix What Is Broken

People who see this problem instinctively look to a line-item veto - the power to cancel individual spending items while approving the rest. Forty-four governors already have some form of it. It is a workaday tool of fiscal sanity in state capitals. But the U.S. President has nothing of the kind.

In 1996, Congress attempted to grant him one through ordinary legislation. The Line Item Veto Act allowed the president to cancel certain spending items and tax benefits after signing a bill. The Supreme Court, in Clinton v. City of New York, struck it down 6-3. The majority held that the Act violated the Presentment Clause of Article I. The president must either sign or reject a bill as Congress passed it, not rewrite it after the fact. I have great respect for Justice Antonin Scalia, a committed originalist, who dissented. He believed the cancellations were permissible exercises of delegated spending discretion, a way for the president to decline to spend what Congress had appropriated. But even among originalists, the constitutional ground is shaky. If the text requires the president to approve or reject bills in their entirety, you cannot by mere statute give him the power to edit them.

That leaves only one honest way forward: amend the Constitution. Far from being a radical departure, such an amendment would be a restoration of the veto's original protective purpose, updated for the realities of modern legislating. It would say, in essence, that the president may approve any appropriation bill in part and disapprove any part. The part disapproved would not become law unless Congress, by a two-thirds vote of each house, overrides the disapproval. The executive gains a surgical scalpel, but Congress retains the ultimate power of the purse, with the same supermajority override it already needs for a full veto. The president's judgment would no longer be held hostage by omnibus packaging. He could exercise discernment, and Congress would be forced to defend each individual handout on its own merits, in the open.

The Scalpel, Not the Club

A predictable objection from some quarters - including some conservatives - is that a line-item veto would dangerously swell executive power. I understand the instinct. An unchecked executive is a threat to liberty, and we should always be wary of centralizing authority. But consider what this tool would actually do.

A president with the line-item veto could only cancel spending. He could not create new spending, raise taxes, rewrite policy, or add a single comma to the text of a law. He could only shrink the scope of government. He would be exercising a power that is fundamentally negative - a power of restraint, not creation. Used aggressively, a line-item veto would be the most effective deregulatory and anti-spending weapon any liberty-minded president has ever held. It would permit him to strip out corporate welfare, redundant agencies, and the thousand little subsidies that sustain the permanent lobbying class in Washington. It would force legislators to defend each earmark individually, in public, rather than burying it inside a mountainous bill that nobody reads. That is not an imperial presidency. It is a presidency that lives up to Hamilton's vision of a sentinel guarding the Treasury against legislative appetite.

Our republic was designed with multiple cooling mechanisms precisely to filter the passions of transient majorities. The veto was one of those filters. A line-item veto simply carries that check into the 21st century, where the threat to liberty is not a single tyrannical statute but a creeping conglomeration of spending riders that no one can stop. Friedrich Hayek warned that the road to serfdom is paved by the small, incremental steps that concentrate power in a central authority while the people are distracted. The omnibus appropriations process is a conveyor belt to that destination precisely because it neutralizes the veto, the one tool the people's highest elected officer has to halt the accumulation. Restoring judgment at the top - giving the president the capacity to say no to particularized waste - is a classic Hayekian response to a planning problem that Congress itself cannot solve.

The Stakes at Your Kitchen Table

This is not a dusty exercise for law review articles. It concerns whether your children inherit a country crushed by debt. The national debt now exceeds $34 trillion, and annual interest payments exceed what we spend on national defense. Every dollar of that debt represents a future tax, a future reduction in your family's freedom. Each time the price of eggs jumps and you feel the squeeze at the grocery store, some fraction of that pain traces back to the fiscal incontinence that no president can restrain with the tools he currently has. Every time a young worker looks at the interest on the debt and wonders whether Social Security will be there, that worker is a victim of a veto that has been effectively disabled. And when voters in flyover country say the system is rigged, they are partly right: it is rigged so that the insiders who load up the omnibus can always win, because the president has no choice but to say yes.

A constitutional amendment for a limited line-item veto would change the gravitational field of Washington. It would arm a future president of either party with a hatchet for the underbrush of waste. It would restore the veto to its original purpose: a guardian of liberty, a check on legislative appetite, a shield for the taxpayer. We have amended the Constitution before to solve structural problems the Framers could not foresee - to end slavery, to secure women's suffrage, to limit presidents to two terms. It is time we do it again, not to concentrate power, but to give the executive the capacity to exercise judgment, to say no to the parts of a bill that do real harm. In doing so, we would give every American a little more control over their own money, their own future, and their own freedom. That is a constitutional check worth writing.