The Supreme Court’s Line-Item Veto Ruling Was a Victory for Limited Government

In 1996, a Republican Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Line Item Veto Act. The idea sounded responsible. Give the president the ability to sign a bill into law and then cancel the individual spending items and targeted tax benefits that never should have survived. Two years later, the Supreme Court killed the whole arrangement by a 6-3 vote in Clinton v. City of New York. Plenty of small-government conservatives treated that ruling as a defeat. I think they had it exactly backwards. The Court did not take away a tool for cutting pork. It stopped a power grab that would have made the federal government more centralized, less accountable, and more dangerous to liberty.

The case is usually framed as a fight about spending. It was never really about spending. It was about whether the president can edit a statute after it has already become law. That is a structural question, and structure matters to free people.

What the Constitution Actually Requires

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution does not describe the president as an editor. It says every bill that passes the House and Senate "shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President." The president then has a binary choice. He can sign the bill as it stands, or he can return it with his objections. He cannot pick which parts become law and which parts die. That is not a drafting oversight. It is the design.

The Line Item Veto Act tried to dodge that design by calling the president's action a "cancellation." But the Constitution regulates substance, not labels. When the president canceled a provision after signing a bill, he was effectively amending a statute. He was repealing part of a law without sending it back through both houses and presenting it again for signature. The Supreme Court saw through the wordplay.

Here is one of the great ironies of the case. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion. Stevens was nobody's idea of a conservative originalist. Yet on the structural question, he read the text and enforced its plain design. He understood that the president was not executing the law. He was rewriting it. That should tell us something. Constitutional structure is not partisan. It is the rule of law.

The Hidden Cost of a Supposedly Simple Tool

The usual argument for a line-item veto is simple: presidents can cut waste. That is the seen benefit. Henry Hazlitt's lesson about economics applies equally to constitutional design. Look beyond the seen to the unseen. The unseen cost here is not just constitutional in the abstract. It changes behavior.

Give a president the line-item veto, and Congress gets every reason to pass bigger, sloppier bills. A member can vote for a boondoggle, take credit at home, and then quietly blame the president when it gets canceled. Responsibility evaporates. The line-item veto does not make Congress spend less. It makes Congress less accountable for what it spends.

Worse, it converts every spending decision into a single-point lobbying battle. Instead of convincing a majority in two chambers, an interest group only has to convince one man in the Oval Office. That is centralization, not restraint. Thomas Sowell has spent a career warning that incentives matter more than intentions. The intention was to cut waste. The incentive is to concentrate power.

Some defenders point out that most governors have a line-item veto. Fair enough. But if the tool actually produced limited government, state budgets would be shrinking. They are not. The item veto changes who holds the pen. It does not reduce the appetite for spending.

There is also a knowledge problem at work. No president, however bright or well staffed, can know the local consequences of thousands of line items as well as the representatives and senators closest to the people. Centralizing those decisions in one office does not produce wiser cuts. It produces more centralized mistakes.

The Founders Wanted Friction

The Founders were not trying to make government efficient. They were trying to make it safe. They separated power deliberately. Bicameralism. Presentment. Veto overrides. Checks and balances. All of it creates friction. That friction is a feature, not a bug. It slows government down so that rights are not casually legislated away.

James Madison put the matter plainly in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Because men are not angels, the Constitution divides power and obliges each branch to control the others.

Under that design, lawmaking is intentionally awkward. A bill must survive two chambers and the president. That process forces negotiation, compromise, and public scrutiny. If the president can sign a bill and then delete the portions he dislikes, he is no longer executing the law. He is editing it. That is legislative power, and the Constitution does not grant it.

Some originalists, including Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent, argued that cancellation is really just a form of delegated spending discretion. After all, presidents decline to spend appropriated money all the time. If Congress gives the executive broad discretion, why can't it give discretion to cancel particular items after the fact?

It is a fair point. But there is a line. Executing a spending program involves judgment about how to achieve statutory goals. Deleting enacted text after presentment is something else entirely. If Congress wants to delegate that much power, it has to do so in the original appropriations. It cannot give the president a standing pen to redact statutes after they become law.

There Is a Right Way to Get This Power

If the American people really want a line-item veto, Article V gives them the lawful path: amend the Constitution. That is the difference between living under the rule of law and living under a government of improvisation. The Constitution's procedures are not suggestions. They are the architecture of a free republic. Congress cannot pass a statute that rewrites the lawmaking process any more than the president can repeal a statute by executive order.

The line-item veto did not threaten liberty because presidents might cut too many programs. It threatened liberty because it conditioned us to accept centralized executive power in exchange for the appearance of fiscal discipline.

Think about the long run. Once we accept that the president can amend statutes after presentment for the sake of spending efficiency, what stops him from canceling tax cuts he dislikes? What stops him from deleting a provision that protects a political rival's state? The Act itself allowed cancellation of limited tax benefits, not just spending. That is a tool for punishing enemies and rewarding friends. President Clinton quickly used the power, including against a provision affecting New York. The lesson was clear. A tool advertised as a pork-cutting knife could just as easily become a tool for political calculation.

The Real Check Has Never Changed

The real check on spending is not a president with a red pen. It is a Congress that fears the voters, and voters who remember that every free program is paid for by someone else.

The Supreme Court's decision in Clinton v. City of New York was not a defeat for spending restraint. It was a victory for the constitutional order that makes spending restraint possible in the first place.

If you want to cut government, do not demand a line-item veto. Demand a Congress that reads the bills, owns the spending, and answers for every dollar.

The Constitution already has the right tool. It is called the power of the purse, and it belongs to the people.