Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields

29. LINE-ITEM VETO STRUCK DOWN

chapter 29 z line item veto struck down Lectures on  American Constitutionalism at WVU  n April 15,1998,Erma and I were in Morgantown,where I delivered a lecture to a student-faculty audience in the West Virginia University Law School’s Lugar Courtroom. WVU President David C. Hardesty, Jr., had invited me to address the University audience, and had requested that my subject be the Constitution, with special reference to the line-item veto. Consequently, my address was titled, “200 Years of Balance: A Symposium on the History of the Constitution and the Balance of Powers.”The symposium at WVU’s College of Law was packed with lawyers, judges, state and local officials, professors and students. President Hardesty introduced me to the audience. Erma sat in the front row with Mrs. Hardesty throughout my lecture. I began my two-hour lecture with a reference to a recent nationwide poll, 91 percent of the respondents having agreed:“‘The U.S. Constitution is important to me.’Yet,despite such overwhelming reverence for the Constitution,only 58 percent of those polled were able to answer correctly that the Constitution established the three branches that make up our federal government; only 66 percent recognized that the first ten amendments to the Constitution constitute the Bill of Rights; 85 percent mistakenly believed that the Constitution says,‘All men are created equal,’or could not identify the source of that famous phrase; and only 58 percent identified the following statement as false: ‘The Constitution states that the first language of the United States is English.’” O 698 chapter 29 Asserting that these poll results were troubling, I stated,“They tell us that while our educational system is good at ingraining feelings of respect and reverence for our Constitution, that same system is apparently very poor at teaching just what is actually in the Constitution and just why it is so important.” I said that the poll also told us something else: “It tells us that many Americans really are hugely ignorant about history. Yet, our Constitution is rooted in history —history that includes the theories, judgments, real life experiences and sacrifices of millions of men and women for generations that go back even a thousand years and beyond!” After tracing the history of American constitutionalism, I declared, “Our constitutional structure is increasingly in peril, and it is the ‘people’s branch’ that is in the greatest danger of giving away its constitutional powers.” I expressed exasperation: “Congress is excessively concerned with political party matters—that’s the root of it. The Bible says:‘For the love of money is the root of all evil’; I say something else is also the root of the erosion of constitutional principles in our country today: political partisanship.” Passionately, I inveighed against the federal line-item veto, stating that it gave to a president the power to wipe individual line items out of the federal budget. Charging that the Line Item Veto Act passed by Congress in 1996 was a clear violation of the“presentation and veto”clauses of Section 7,Article I, of the U.S. Constitution, I declared that the 1996 legislation“allows the president to sign an appropriations bill into law and then, quite preposterously, within five days, strike out parts of that same law which he does not like. It, in effect , gives the president power to unilaterally amend or repeal legislation after it has become law. It makes the president a superlegislator, capable of singlehandedly amending a law that was passed by both Houses of Congress. And each time a president uses it, he violates the separation of powers spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. He is required by the Constitution to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ But under the Line Item Veto Act, the president does not take care to faithfully execute the law; he mutilates the law.” I continued: “So much for hundreds of years of history, experience, and human bloodshed. So much for the long centuries of British struggle in controlling tyrannical monarchs. Congress took the easy way out. Congress handed the president of the United States a power that presidents have been salivating after for years—the line-item veto.” line item veto struck down 699 Declaring that such legislation was a club in the hands of any president to intimidate members of Congress, I charged, “This was an act of...