The Man Who Won't Veto: One power that George W. Bush eschews.

In 1788, as the Founders debated whether the president of the United States should have the power to veto acts of Congress, Alexander Hamilton argued that the president should be able to reject newly passed laws -- and that the mere threat of using such a weapon would help keep Congress in line. "A power of this nature in the executive will often have a silent and unperceived, though forcible, operation," Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 73. "When men, engaged in unjustifiable pursuits, are aware that obstructions may come from a quarter which they cannot control, they will often be restrained by the bare apprehension of opposition, from doing what they would with eagerness rush into, if no such external impediments were to be feared."

Was there such fear recently on Capitol Hill, when Congress passed the $190 billion farm bill -- a bill that President George W. Bush had indicated he would sign no matter what was in it? Were members of Congress fearful when they passed an education bill he was similarly determined to sign? Were they afraid when they passed campaign-finance reform, which many serious scholars believe is unconstitutional? In each case, Bush not only did not veto the legislation, he did not threaten to veto, either -- forfeiting the power that Hamilton saw as critical to the president's relationship with Congress. In fact, in 16 months in office, Bush has yet to veto a single bill.

All of this has some conservatives wondering what it will take for Bush, who has moved aggressively to protect the other powers and prerogatives of the presidency, to veto a bill. "He's veto averse," columnist Robert Novak said recently. "The problem is, he may lose his base."

Maybe, and maybe not -- polls consistently show that Bush remains very popular with conservative Republicans. But the president is in danger of losing something else: his credibility with Congress. Yes, he has threatened to veto a few spending measures, and won some concessions from lawmakers. And yes, he won a compromise on a "patient's bill of rights" in part by threatening a veto (although his opponents on the Hill knew he really, really didn't want to do it). But veto threats will work only so long as the other side believes the president might go through with it. Without that, they're just words.

Part of Bush's veto reluctance has to do with his delicate relationship with Congress. While Democrats try to stop Bush's agenda in the Senate, GOP control of the House means that any bill that reaches the president's desk has gone through the senior leadership of his own party. "For the House Republican leaders to schedule something that the president then turns around and vetoes is almost a repudiation of the House leadership," says one senior GOP aide on the Hill. "The White House can't figure out a way to veto a bill without embarrassing House Republicans." (Campaign finance would have been an opportunity to do just that, since its supporters won House approval by bypassing the leadership, but Bush still chose not to act.)

While it stands to reason that a president with a Congress controlled by his own party would veto fewer bills -- Bill Clinton did not veto any bills in his first two years in office, when Democrats controlled both houses -- presidents in the past have used the veto liberally when control of Congress was divided or in the other party's hands entirely. Ronald Reagan, who had Republican control of the Senate for six of his eight years in office, vetoed 78 bills. Bush's father, who faced opposition in both houses for his entire term, vetoed 44 bills. Whatever the case, when the president vetoes something, Congress is usually unwilling or unable to come up with the two-thirds vote it takes to overturn it. George H. W. Bush was overturned just once. Bill Clinton vetoed 38 bills and was overturned twice. If Bush decides to veto something, he'll probably win.

"You have to veto some bills," says Gary Galemore, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service who has spent years studying the topic. "That really makes the president a part of the legislative process, so when his people on the Hill say something, members have to pay more attention to it." Bush, Galemore continues, "has backed off on several things, and pretty soon you could have the same problem with veto threats that you have with terrorist alerts -- people don't pay attention."

Bush has also, at least so far, stayed away from something called the signing statement, which presidents have used in the past to take public positions on bills about which they have reservations, but have chosen to sign. First used by Andrew Jackson in 1830, the signing statement allows a president to make a formal summary of his objections to a bill; it's especially important if the president has doubts about the constitutionality of the measure he is signing. "When President Reagan approved the Gramm-Rudman legislation in 1985 because of his concern that 'deficits have threatened our economic well-being for too long,' he nonetheless observed that the new law unconstitutionally assigned executive functions to agents of Congress," Terry Eastland wrote in Energy in the Executive. "The next year, the president through his solicitor general successfully argued this position before the Supreme Court in Bowsher v. Synar." Reagan had the credibility to oppose part of a bill he signed because he laid out his opposition from the very beginning.

Bush could have done something similar with campaign finance. Instead, he signed it without comment, limiting his protest to the timing of his signature: early morning, when no one was looking. Although the bill certainly did not merit a Rose Garden ceremony, Bush's handling of it made him look petty, when he could have used a signing statement, as Reagan did with Gramm-Rudman, to express his serious doubts about parts of the bill.

Administration officials say they understand the criticism -- they just don't agree with it. The veto talk, says one administration aide, is "born of frustration with watching Daschle tank everything." But the aide points to the success Bush had with veto threats on a homeland-security package and an earlier agricultural spending bill and says Republicans should go easy on what the aide calls the "you oughta, you oughta, you oughta" strategy. Some Republicans, the aide complains, are willing to tell the president he ought to veto this bill, or veto that bill, without doing the hard work to craft a bill that the president can sign. "One thing that would be helpful would be a plan of action that doesn't rely on a veto," the aide says.

Besides, Bush will veto something sooner or later, and probably this year. Sources in Congress and the administration point to coming appropriations bills that may push the president past his fiscal limit. There's also a veto possibility if Congress tries to keep alive the Crusader artillery system, which the secretary of defense, for one, wants scotched. Unlike spending bills, in which the president just doesn't have the street cred of a man who will fight for a tight budget, the Crusader could be Bush's kind of battle. "It's no longer a fight about the merits of the Crusader," says a Hill staffer. "It's a fight about the ability of the president, through his secretary of defense, to cancel a project." A Crusader veto, if it comes to that, would be a twofer for Bush -- killing a program that the president believes is unnecessary and at the same time making his future veto threats all the more believable. Alexander Hamilton would understand.