Veto? A Tale of Two Georges

Posted by Eric F. Langborgh on 05 Apr 2006 at 12:52 pm

On this date in 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto under the new Constitution. On this date in 2006 — over five years into the 43rd President’s reign — George W. Bush has yet to exercise his first veto.

In Article I, Section 7, the Constitution describes the power of the president to veto legislation:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it.

Given the president’s oath of office, these objections should be based on the grounds that the legislation is either unwise or unconstitutional. Has there really been no legislation passed by the 107th and 108th Congresses that violated the Constitution or simple common sense? Given the explosion in the size of the federal government under President Bush, that seems highly unlikely. In fact, even when looking only at non-defense spending, the government has grown faster under Dubya than under any president since Jimmy Carter and the twilight of the Great Society: (click graph for larger image and related article)

(As a side note and as another blight against the Republican Party’s claim to still be for “limited government,” it is revealing that federal spending exploded during Bill Clinton’s second term, after the GOP took over both houses of Congress, compared to his first term when the Democrats controlled both the Executive and Legislative branches for two years. But I digress.)

In fact, when the growth in the size of government is taken as a percentage of gross domestic product, President Bush has presided over a much more activist government than presidents considered by conventional wisdom to be much more liberal than he. As of today, Bush has okayed budgets that have increased the size of government 2.4 percent beyond the expansion of the economy during his term in office. According to the White House’s own numbers, the federal government is currently spending 20.8 cents of every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001. “That’s the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt,” claims a recent USA Today article.

This compares to a decrease during Bill Clinton’s eight years of 1.8 percent. Even that most socialist of presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson, wasn’t able to expand government more than a percentage point above the economy’s growth. And LBJ, like Bush, served at a time when his party controlled both houses of Congress.

Moreover, LBJ did not let his party’s control of the Legislative Branch of government prevent his use of the veto pen. He vetoed 30 bills during his term; remarkably, none were overridden. Bush is often compared in the media to Ronald Reagan, but he can’t hold a candle to Reagan’s presidency in this (or nearly any other) area. Reagan vetoed 78 would-be laws, being overridden 9 times. Clinton used his veto power 37 times. In only one term, Carter used his 31 times. Bush should have at least learned from his father, who in one term found 44 pieces of legislation unworthy of becoming law. (For a full listing of presidential vetoes, click here.)

Up until the Civil War, presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln seldom used the veto, because all parties were more or less concerned with staying within the bounds that the Constitution set out for our great republic. In other words, the veto was largely unnecessary.

Since then, with the emergence of the Progressives and the successive waves of government expansion under Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, the New Deal, the Great Society, and now “compassionate conservatism,” most presidents have expressed some latent misgivings for their increasing disregard for the limits set upon the federal government by the Constitution, by using their veto pens with great frequency.

Apparently, today’s George has no similar pangings of his conscience.

UPDATE: See also my subsequent posts on this Dubya and his veto reticence: