CLINTON SIGNS LINE-ITEM VETO.Byline: Robert A. Rankin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire Ronald Reagan demanded it 100 years after Ulysses S Ulysses: see Odysseus. Ulysses Joyce novel long banned in U.S. for its sexual frankness. [Irish Lit.: Benét, 1037] See : Censorship . Grant first asked for it, but it fell to Bill Clinton on Tuesday to sign historic legislation finally granting presidents the line-item veto line-i·tem veto n. Authority, as of a government executive, to reject provisions of a bill individually. Also called item veto. . The symbolic importance of the measure is clear: It gives the president new authority to cut bits and pieces of spending approved by Congress and thus tilts the 200-year-old balance of power toward presidents. President Clinton hailed the law with unqualified praise when signing it in an Oval Office ceremony. ``It will help us to cut waste and to balance the budget,'' Clinton said, noting that 43 of 50 state governors hold such power. Sen. Bob Dole, who hopes to wield the power next year as a newly elected Republican president, saluted the statute in similar terms. ``It will help put Washington on a pork-free diet,'' Dole said. Yet whether the law will make much real difference in how Washington works is anything but clear. For starters, the Supreme Court will be asked to declare it unconstitutional. Legalities aside, the law contains built-in limits that sharply restrict its power to make much of a dent in federal budget deficits. ``There is less to it than meets the eye,'' summed up Benjamin Ginsberg This article is about the politician and lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg. For the businessman, see Benjamin Ginsberg (businessman) Benjamin L. Ginsberg, partner for Patton Boggs, LLP, represents numerous political parties, political campaigns, candidates, members of , director of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University, mainly at Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins in 1867 had a group of his associates incorporated as the trustees of a university and a hospital, endowing each with $3.5 million. Daniel C. in Baltimore. To highlight the measure's historic significance, Clinton announced he would send the first four pens he used in signing it to recent presidents who had fought futilely for it - Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan and George Bush. Presidents have long railed about the practice of lawmakers' tucking local special-interest spending provisions into large, sometimes unrelated bills. The line-item veto became a Republican quest after Verb 1. quest after - go in search of or hunt for; "pursue a hobby" quest for, go after, pursue look for, search, seek - try to locate or discover, or try to establish the existence of; "The police are searching for clues"; "They are searching for the Reagan called for it in his 1984 State of the Union address “State of the Union” redirects here. For other uses, see State of the Union (disambiguation). The State of the Union is an annual address in which the President of the United States reports on the status of the country, normally to a joint session of Congress (the ; Congress finally delivered this year after the GOP included it in the 1994 ``Contract With America In the historic 1994 midterm elections, Republicans won a majority in Congress for the first time in forty years, partly on the appeal of a platform called the Contract with America. Put forward by House Republicans, this sweeping ten-point plan promised to reshape government. .'' Clinton hailed it as a ``bipartisan achievement.'' The new law empowers the president to kill individual items in big spending bills; tax breaks targeted to benefit 100 or fewer people; and new or expanded ``entitlement'' benefits. Previously, the Constitution required presidents to accept or veto bills as a whole. Many legal scholars think it still does. |
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