[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 75 (Wednesday, June 15, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 15, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             LINE-ITEM VETO

  Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, I have sought recognition to comment 
about a very interesting and important hearing in the Judiciary 
Committee Subcommittee on Constitutional Law relating to the line-item 
veto, which I believe may soon be coming before the full Senate. It is 
worthy of a few comments at this time to summarize some of the 
testimony from a very distinguished panel of constitutional law 
experts.
  The resolution which I had introduced calls for a sense of the Senate 
to encourage the President to exercise the line-item veto on the legal 
proposition that the President currently has authority to exercise the 
line-item veto. That follows an interpretation of the Constitution 
which has been endorsed by a number of prominent legal scholars, one of 
whom is Prof. Forrest McDonald from the University of Alabama, who has 
written extensively and persuasively on the subject.
  Professor McDonald is a leading constitutional expert, historical 
expert, who has recently published a book on the Presidency which has 
been widely acclaimed. It is his analysis and the analysis of others, 
in which I concur, that the key clause, article I, section 7, clause 3 
of the U.S. Constitution gives the President currently line-item veto.
  That clause was extracted from the Massachusetts Constitution, which 
has as its origin the effort of the Massachusetts lawmakers, the 
constitutional authorities, to limit excessive spending. And clause 3 
follows clause 2, which is the President's general veto authority. So 
that, as a matter of constitutional interpretation, this clause was 
added to give the President the authority to exercise the line-item 
veto.
  In this morning's hearings, there were a number of authorities who 
testified on both sides of the issue, as you might expect on a 
controversial constitutional question. It is well known that there are 
splits of authority on issues like this, with the Supreme Court of the 
United States very frequently dividing on a 5-to-4 basis.
  We know a very distinguished former Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, made one of the 
statements which has been frequently referred to, that the Constitution 
is what the Supreme Court says it is. It is not quite that broad. The 
Supreme Court cannot pull an interpretation from the air. But there are 
many clauses in the Constitution which are subject to various 
interpretations, and when that occurs the frequent course of action is 
for a test case to be brought. It is my hope that we will have a test 
case brought and that a sense of the Senate, saying to the President we 
submit there is a constitutional basis for exercising the line-item 
veto, would be most appropriate.
  For those who may be listening on C-SPAN and for those in the 
gallery--there are not too many Senators on the floor, only two of us; 
you, Madam President, presiding, and I, speaking--the line-item veto is 
the authority which would give the President power to strike a given 
line from the appropriations bill and strike a given line on any 
legislation which passes the Congress.
  Frequently, the President of the United States will receive 
appropriations bills, sometimes in an omnibus appropriations bill, in 
the form of a continuing resolution which sometimes is a foot thick. 
Some of our viewers may recall one of President Reagan's State of the 
Union speeches, where he was complaining to the Congress about 
receiving enormous appropriations bills, which gave him the Hobson's 
choice of either signing the entire bill, where there were many 
provisions which he did not like, or vetoing the entire bill, which 
would have brought the Government to a close.
  I recall one speech of the President to a joint session of the 
Congress, where he had legislation which was about a foot thick, 
balanced--I thought precariously--on the edge of the podium. And I was 
worried because I thought--and probably many others watching television 
were worried--it was going to fall. Then I got the point. President 
Reagan was keeping us in suspense. He was a master of that. And he had 
control of that hefty pile of papers. But he was illustrating the point 
about a massive appropriations bill: He should not have to, in effect, 
take it or leave it all.
  Since that time, the Congress has been better in submitting 13 
separate appropriations bills. But, still they are very thick and they 
contain many, many spending items. It is my view, and the view of many, 
many others, that at the time when we have a national debt of $4.5 
trillion, and last year had a budget deficit of $255 billion, and 
knowing the ways of the Congress in including many items which are 
excessive expenditures--the one referred to very frequently in today's 
hearing was a major appropriation for a tribute to Lawrence Welk--which 
hardly warrant borrowing.
  There are many items, and Members do what they think is in the 
interests of their own constituents--in the House, their own districts; 
in the Senate, their own States--where the appropriations simply do not 
measure up to a standard of national importance, sufficient to borrow 
money on. I think that is the standard which we have to apply when we 
pass bills. Is this item, is this appropriation, sufficient for us to 
borrow money? Because, when we have a budget of $1.5 trillion--and 
those are astronomical figures, hard to really quantify or understand 
what they mean--but against a budget of $1.5 trillion, when the deficit 
is $255 billion, that means we spend $255 billion more than we take in 
in revenues--the question has to be asked, is a given item worth 
borrowing money for? I think, if we put it to that test, many times if 
we had this isolated, we would say that it was not worth paying for.
  There have been many efforts to have a constitutional amendment for a 
line-item veto. Those efforts have failed because you have to come to a 
two-thirds vote. But I do think that if we voted on these items 
individually--some of the constitutional amendments proposed that if 
the item was vetoed on a line item by the President, they would come 
back and would have to be overruled only by a simple majority as 
opposed to two-thirds--I think many of those items, if exposed to that 
kind of specific vote, would not survive. But even if you have the 
line-item veto interpreted under the existing clause of the 
Constitution, that the Congress can still override the President's veto 
if we felt strongly about it. But I think many, many of those items 
would not be overridden on a congressional vote.
  The specifics, for just a minute, on the legal interpretation, turn 
on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, adopted some 7 years before 
the U.S. Constitution. That Constitution had a provision which was 
first implemented in 1733, to give the Governor a check on unbridled 
spending by the Colonial Legislature which had put the Colony in 
serious debt. It sounds very much like the United States of America 
today.
  That clause was lifted totally, article I, section 3, clause 7, and 
put in the U.S. Constitution. There is history in the Federalist, 
comments by Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that the constitutional 
provision tallies exactly with the revisionary authority of the Council 
of Revision in New York, which, according to Professor McDonald, had 
the power to revise appropriations bills very similar to the line-item 
veto.
  James Madison noted the comments of Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, 
that ``The only purpose of article I section 7, clause 3, was to take 
money out--was to eliminate votes which took money out of the 
Treasury.'' So that, unless clause 3 had the intent of being a line-
item veto, authority for the line-item veto, there would be no purpose 
for the clause, clause 3, in addition to clause 2, which provided for 
the President's general veto power.
  Madam President, I had an opportunity to discuss this issue with 
President Bush and urged him to exercise the line-item veto. President 
Bush said that his lawyer told him he did not have any authority. When 
he said that, I made the suggestion that he change lawyers, then I 
added not to tell the bar association because that might not be too 
good, one lawyer commenting about another lawyer and some of the rules 
of our profession.
  I had the chance to bring the issue up with President Clinton. I 
wrote to him on the subject, provided an authority, got a nice reply 
back where President Clinton said he did not think it appropriate to 
exercise the line-item veto and, in fact, a representative from the 
Attorney General's office testified today, Assistant Attorney General 
Walter Dellinger, head of the Office of Legal Counsel testified that he 
thought the President did not have the line-item veto authority. But 
Professor Dellinger did say that it was a matter of which reasonable 
minds could differ. It would be pretty hard for him not to say that, 
considering the fact Senator Thurmond testified in favor of it and I 
testified in favor of the line-item veto and a number of others had 
said there was constitutional authority for the line-item veto.
  So it is not a matter which has a foregone conclusion, but in the 
context of the very serious deficit which we have and in the context of 
the very major national debt which we have in this country, that there 
is sufficient authority for the line-item veto.
  So I submit that it ought to be exercised by the President and there 
ought to be a court test case.
  Madam President, although I have introduced this into the Record 
before, I think it is worthwhile at this point not to submit all of the 
documents, but to submit the article by Prof. Forrest McDonald setting 
forth the constitutional authority for the line-item veto so that those 
who read the Congressional Record will have a fuller statement as to 
the constitutional authority of the President to exercise the line-item 
veto. I ask unanimous consent to print that article in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               The Framers' Conception of the Veto Power

                      (By Prof. Forrest McDonald)

       I must begin by making a couple of demurrers or 
     disclaimers. I am by no means an expert on budgetary 
     processes. And I have no policy recommendations to make.
       What I can claim some expertise in and what I propose to 
     address is how the Framers thought, what was going on in the 
     eighteenth century, and what their conceptions of a number of 
     subjects were, including the veto. When we speak of the veto 
     power, historically and at present, we are actually dealing 
     with two different subjects--closely, intimately related, but 
     still different subjects. The one is executive control over 
     spending; the other is the executive share in legislation. 
     Historically, these were two different things.
       The Framers were learned in history. They knew from Roman 
     history of models of a veto that were derived from the 
     ancient tribunes. But for the most part when they talked of 
     vetoes, when they thought of the subject, they thought of 
     British history. How things had evolved in England, how 
     things had evolved in their own colonial experience and, to a 
     lesser extent, their more immediate state experience since 
     1776, made up their thinking about vetoes.
       In England, the king always had a veto, which was in the 
     form of his power to say no. If he said no or if he didn't 
     approve of a proposed body of legislation, it was not 
     enacted. Thus did he exercise a share in, and a control over, 
     the legislative power. The veto did not, however, extend to 
     spending bills. It did not extend to spending bills because 
     of the peculiar nature of taxation and appropriation.
       Sir William Blackstone had clearly defined taxes as they 
     had come to be understood in the English-speaking world, 
     ``Taxes,'' he said, ``are a portion which each subject 
     contributes of his property in order to secure the 
     remainder.'' Thus, taxes in the Anglo-Saxon scheme of things, 
     were held to be a voluntary gift from the people to the 
     sovereign. It made no sense, therefore, for the king to have 
     a veto power over the gifts that the subjects were giving to 
     him. What he did have, however, was total discretionary power 
     as to how to spend it.
       As to the veto of legislation, again, Blackstone makes 
     clear what it meant: ``We may apply to the royal negative 
     what Cicero observes of the negative of the Roman tribunes, 
     that the Crown has not any power of doing wrong, but merely 
     of preventing wrong from being done.'' That remains the way 
     to think of a veto. In England, however, by the eighteenth 
     century, the veto had become pretty well obsolete. The last 
     king actually to exercise it on a large sale was King William 
     in the 1690s. Queen Anne vetoed one measure and that raised 
     such a storm of protest that it nearly disappeared.
       But interestingly enough, what came along in lieu of it was 
     the Crown's control over spending. The Prime Minister, as 
     evolved in the eighteenth century, was always a member of 
     Parliament who, if he was in the House of Commons, was 
     Chancellor of the Exchequer; if he was in the House of Lords, 
     he was the Lord Treasurer. By their use of the appropriations 
     which came into the treasury, they influenced legislation--
     usually in a highly corrupt way to which most Americans 
     eventually objected. Beyond the development in England, in 
     the colonies there was direct experience with the veto in 
     three different ways. To understand the colonial experience, 
     one must remember that there were different kinds of 
     colonies; proprietary, corporate, and royal.
       Two colonies, Pennsylvania and Maryland, were proprietary 
     colonies. The Penn family and the Calvert family owned the 
     land, and the government was whatever government they 
     established. Two other colonies, Connecticut and Rhode 
     Island, were ``corporate'' colonies; self-governing entities. 
     The other nine colonies were royal colonies; ruled by the 
     Crown through his agents. The governors of those colonies 
     were always agents of the king.
       Now, to some extent the experience was different in each of 
     the three types of colonies. The royal governors did not 
     exercise a veto at all, except in one respect, and that was 
     then the lower house of the legislature nominated or actually 
     appointed the members of the upper house of the legislature. 
     The upper house was sort of a combination of today's 
     presidential cabinet and the Senate, an upper house as well 
     as an advisory executive council. The royal governor had a 
     veto--line-item veto, as it were--over any one of those 
     appointed. The royal governors were not required to accept or 
     reject the whole slate. If there were fifteen names on a 
     list, they could eliminate one or more.
       The second kind of veto development in the proprietary 
     colonies. Originally, under the charter of government (the 
     Charter of Liberties) which William Penn granted to the 
     prospective citizens or subjects of Pennsylvania, the veto 
     was a direct copy of the ancient Roman system. In ancient 
     Rome, the senate legislated, and the people, through the 
     tribunes, had the veto power. Penn and his advisors proposed 
     legislation. It went out to the people (through their 
     tribunes, in effect) and if the people accepted it, it was 
     law; if they did not accept it, it was not law.
       By the middle of the eighteenth century, this system had 
     changed. The Penn family, as colonial governors, or their 
     designates as colonial governors, had come to have and to 
     exercise repeatedly a line-item veto. They could take out a 
     particular comma, a particular passage, a particular 
     appropriation. The veto in Pennsylvania by then applied to 
     both appropriations and to normal legislation and was 
     selectively applied. It was, in other words, a line-item 
     veto, though the phrase had yet to be coined.
       In 1696, His Majesty's Privy Council created an 
     administrative body called the Board of Trade, which came to 
     exercise the third kind of veto. The Board of Trade reviewed 
     all legislation passed by the colonies from 1696 to 1776. 
     During the course of that eighty-year period the Board 
     reviewed 8,563 pieces of legislation. The members made clear 
     almost from the beginning, in 1702, that the veto that they 
     were exercising in the name of the Crown was a selective 
     veto, a line-item veto. They vetoed all or part 469 pieces of 
     legislation in the eighty years in which the Board of Trade 
     oversaw the colonies.\1\
       The period after 1776, however, is the period of greatest 
     interest in understanding the veto power that came to be part 
     of the Constitution. In regard to government spending, from 
     the very beginning and growing out of colonial experience, 
     appropriations were always made by legislatures. But 
     appropriations were always permissive, not mandatory. A 
     legislature voted a sum, and the governor, or whoever was 
     charged with spending it; but he spent it at his discretion, 
     so there was, built into the appropriations process, a kind 
     of selective veto. Normally, the constitutions of several 
     states indicated that expenditures were to be disbursed at 
     the disrection--the sole descretion--of the governor.
       Francis Newton Thorpe's seven volumes of colonial charters 
     and state constitutions provide an absolutely crucial set of 
     documents for understanding this formative period. For 
     instance, North Carolina's first state constitution, that of 
     1776, made it explicit that no money could be taken out of 
     the public treasury except at the discretion of the governor. 
     The Virginia constitution of 1776 said the same thing. The 
     Pennsylvania constitution, the Massachusetts constitution of 
     1780, the New Hampshire constitution of 1784, and so on, all 
     made that clear.
       In practice, legislatures made large, lump-sum 
     appropriations. Appropriations that were made by the state 
     legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, and New York during 
     this period, 1776 to 1787, each had a maximum number of nine 
     headings. That would be for the civil list and for paying 
     veterans' bonuses or invalid veterans' pensions and the like. 
     Still the funds were allocated in broad, blanket grants of 
     money, and it was left to the executive authority, usually 
     the governor, to spend as he pleased within the legislatively 
     established limits.
       In regard to the veto power over legislation, the 
     experience of the states in the early years ran as follows. 
     Most states were loath to provide a veto because of the 
     reaction against executive power that was built into 
     independence itself.\2\ Two states did, however, provide a 
     veto power--New York and Massachusetts--and both used the 
     word ``revision.'' The word ``revision'' is significant 
     because the American conception of the veto power was 
     originally a revising power, not merely a nay-saying 
     power.\3\ It is also significant because in Federalist No. 
     69, Hamilton describes the presidential veto as differing 
     from the ``absolute negative of the British sovereign''; 
     rather, its power ``tallies exactly with the revisionary 
     authority of the council of revision'' of New York.
       The New York Council of Revision consisted of the governor 
     of the state and certain judicial officers, and together they 
     reviewed all legislation that came before, or that was passed 
     by, the New York Assembly. In fact, they reviewed it twice. 
     The legislation was proposed, and lest anybody act hastily, 
     it had to be read three times. Then it went to the Council of 
     Revision, and the Council looked it over selectively, and 
     sent it back to the legislature, not approved or disapproved 
     in total, but with recommendations for revision. Normally the 
     legislature would then take the proposed revisions into 
     account and enact the bill into law. After it was enacted 
     into law, it would come back to the Council of Revision, and 
     now the Council had a selective veto, a line-item process.
       The Massachusetts case is rather more interesting, and here 
     one sees the background of the now famous Clause 3 of Article 
     1, Section 7 of the United States Constitution. In 1721, the 
     legislature of Massachusetts, seeking to get around the 
     prospective veto of the Board of Trade, had made its 
     appropriations for the year by resolution, not by act. The 
     Board of Trade was empowered to review all acts of colonial 
     legislatures, but a resolution, said the House of 
     Representatives, was not an act. They made appropriations 
     that way--and got away with it--until 1729, when the Board of 
     Trade said that was unacceptable.
       The House then decided to do it a different way. Rather 
     than pass any resolutions, they undertook to pass ``votes,'' 
     to make appropriations by votes. And in 1730 and 1731, the 
     Massachusetts legislature made appropriations through votes, 
     and significantly, it also disbursed the funds by votes, 
     getting around the royal governor as well as the Board of 
     Trade.
       Then an interesting thing happened, as always happens when 
     legislative spending has no effective external restraint. The 
     public debts of the colony of Massachusetts became absolutely 
     intolerable. The colony was going broke, and by 1733, the 
     House of Representatives decided to give the governor a 
     check. Throughout the remainder of the colonial period, the 
     finances of the colony of Massachusetts were kept under 
     control because the legislators had had this earlier 
     experience; they had learned that when legislatures are left 
     to spend freely, they go beserk.
       This background makes it easier to understand the veto 
     provisions of the Constitution. During the Constitutional 
     Convention of 1787, various proposals were made. Some people, 
     Alexander Hamilton for instance, indicated early on that they 
     wanted an absolute veto; others, Benjamin Franklin in 
     particular, opposed any kind of veto. The Convention decided 
     on a qualified veto. Then, on August 14th and 15th, the 
     delegates got around to the phraseology of the veto. There 
     was some confusion on the 14th, and on the next day, Governor 
     Edmund Randolph of Virginia made a proposal, essentially 
     taken from the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, to 
     incorporate the language dealing with resolutions and acts. 
     The idea was to control the Congress by providing for a veto 
     against resolutions as well as acts.
       The language of Article I, Section 7, Clause 3, like the 
     first clause of the section, is taken directly from the 
     Massachusetts constitution. Both paragraphs, like their 
     Massachusetts prototype, were designed to prevent the 
     Congress from running amok, to make responsibility lie in the 
     presidency.
       During the course of the contests over ratification of the 
     Constitution, interestingly enough, there was very little 
     comment about the veto in any way. Two Anti-Federalist tracts 
     against the Constitution objected to the Constitution, among 
     other reasons, because Article I, Section 7, Clause 3 made 
     too strong a line-item veto in the hands of the President.
       The only Federalist speaking in a ratifying convention who 
     addressed the subject was Governor James Bowdoin of 
     Massachusetts. Bowdoin spoke in favor of the veto in such a 
     way as to suggest that he understood it to be a power of 
     revision and, therefore, a selective power. He did not say so 
     explicitly, but it is clear in light of the Massachusetts 
     experience.
       When the government was formed under the Constitution in 
     1789, and for the first two or three years, the Congress 
     followed the same procedure that had been followed by the 
     colonies and by the several state governments, that is to 
     say, it voted general, lump-sum appropriations under headings 
     of three or four departments. The veto power was assumed to 
     have a dual nature. One was the power of revision of regular 
     legislation, the other the power to control or prohibit 
     spending in particular areas. The dual nature of the veto 
     experience of the Americans was sometimes separate, sometimes 
     the same; but in both areas, the experience was that the 
     negative was essentially a line-item, a specific thing.
       Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and President 
     Washington both took the position that appropriations were, 
     again, permissive, not mandatory. They often shifted funds 
     around and there were considerable hassles on occasion over 
     such shifting. Indeed, the Anti-Federalists, who now were 
     calling themselves Republicans in opposition to the way 
     Hamilton was running the Treasury Department, began to make 
     investigations. They argued that Hamilton was improperly 
     transferring funds. But Hamilton had always gone to 
     Washington for approval. There was only one very sticky time 
     when Washington could not remember that he had given the 
     approval to Hamilton; but the point is that it was assumed 
     that Washington, as President, had the power.
       More interesting is the experience of Thomas Jefferson. By 
     1801, line-item appropriations had become something like the 
     norm. Jefferson himself had an interesting conception of what 
     his veto power and what his powers were in relation to 
     finances, and it was clearly a line-item power.
       In one famous instance Jefferson announced that he refused 
     to spend $50,000 on gunboats as appropriated by Congress. 
     There was a good reason for Jefferson's decision in that 
     instance. We were expecting war with Spain when the 
     appropriations were made. Then, things cooled off. To 
     Jefferson's way of thinking there was no longer any point in 
     building the gunboats. That was not, strictly speaking, a 
     reversal of the policy of Congress. It was merely a matter of 
     seeing that the circumstances had changed and assuming that 
     Congress would have changed also had it been in session.
       On another occasion, Jefferson again used a line-item veto 
     to refuse to expend money. This he announced in his first 
     annual message to Congress in 1802. Congress has appropriated 
     a considerable sum of money to build various fortifications. 
     Nothing had changed, as it had in the other example, but 
     Jefferson thought the fortifications unnecessary, a wasteful 
     use of public funds. So he announced to Congress that he had 
     decided to ``suspend and slacken the expenditures.'' He 
     changed Congress' policy in this regard. Jefferson sent the 
     legislation back to Congress to be reconsidered. During this 
     time, he held it up; he refused to spend the money for a 
     year. Congress did not reappropriate the money. The point is 
     that Jefferson, in his sole discretion as President, assumed 
     he had the power to decide whether the appropriated monies 
     should be spent or not.
       It is not just at the national level where we see the 
     original understanding behind the veto power. The experience 
     of the states after the adoption of the federal Constitution 
     is important to understanding the experience of the federal 
     government for two reasons. First, what the states did 
     immediately after the adoption of the federal Constitution is 
     an indication of their understanding of what the veto power 
     was and what, particularly, Clause 3 meant. A number of 
     states, upon the ratification of the Constitution, adopted 
     constitutional amendments to make their constitutions square 
     with the new federal charter. Several states adopted new 
     constitutions from scratch. Georgia did in 1789, Pennsylvania 
     in 1790, and Delaware in the early 1790s. Kentucky's first 
     constitution was in 1792. Vermont revised its constitution. 
     Tennessee got a new one, and so on. In each case, they 
     adopted the phraseology of Article I, Section 7 and the 
     governors began immediately to exercise the veto in a line-
     item fashion. That was their understanding of what Article I, 
     Section 7 meant when they incorporated it into their own 
     constitutions.
       The second reason that the experience of the states is 
     important is that in the states the real spending occurred. 
     The volume of expenditure by government in the United States 
     through the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth 
     centuries was not overwhelming; the big bucks were spent at 
     the state and local levels. As late as 1990, for example, 
     state and local expenditures were ten times that of the 
     federal government. In the middle of the nineteenth century, 
     they would have run twenty or thirty times as much. Thus, if 
     we want to know how the people and governmental institutions 
     coped during the early years with the problem of big spending 
     or excessive spending or whatever, we must turn to the state 
     experience.
       By the 1820s and 1830s, spending at the state level had 
     become enormous. It had gotten out of hand because 
     legislators had the capacity to collect taxes on a sufficient 
     scale to spend on boondoggles--all kinds of public and quasi-
     public projects--and governors, except in the few states 
     which had adopted the equivalent of the federal 
     Constitution's line-item veto, were powerless to cope. There 
     was a collapse cycle in government spending in the United 
     States throughout the nineteenth century. After each major 
     financial panic--1837, 1857, and 1873--states found 
     themselves virtually bankrupt because of overspending, and 
     each time this happened, there would be a new round of 
     constitutional checks on the legislative power to spend.
       One of the things that most of the states adopted at some 
     point was a requirement that a bill which becomes an act must 
     have only one subject.\4\ Some of them went so far as to 
     declare that every bill had to have a title, that everything 
     in the bill must pertain to the title, and that anything not 
     pertaining to the title was automatically annulled.
       Several states required that any appropriations for what 
     was called the civil list (the government payroll for 
     ordinary, full-time employees) must be made in lump sums but 
     that everything else had to be in separate and single bills. 
     By the 1840s, the idea of a line-item veto to control fiscal 
     irresponsibility in the legislatures was coming to 
     prominence. It did not originate in the Confederate 
     constitution as some have suggested. There were three 
     Northern states which had already adopted the line-item veto 
     before the Civil War.\5\ It became very common after the 
     Civil War.
       The lesson that was learned in the states during the early 
     years of the Republic was the lesson Alexander Hamilton had 
     endeavored to teach in one of the Federalist essays. The more 
     people there are involved in the decision-making process, the 
     less responsible any one is, and a legislature, being a 
     numerous body, in the nature of things, cannot restrain 
     itself. It is so numerous as to be politically blameless. It 
     ceases to be responsible because no one is accountable. It 
     ceases to exercise control over a budget. It appropriates in 
     vague and general terms. And, while the people will eagerly 
     vote out of office those elected representatives of the 
     people who tax to an extreme, they will not vote them out for 
     spending excessively.
       The only way effectively to check the excessiveness of a 
     legislature at any level, national or state, is to have 
     responsibility vested in one person so that that one person 
     takes all of the heat if things go out of control. That is 
     the essence of accountability; that is the fount of 
     responsibility.
       Let me close with a quotation from Alexander Tytler, an 
     obscure but perceptive figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. 
     (He had a relative who was the sole author of the second 
     edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but he himself was a 
     quite secondary figure.) Tytler expressed a thought which 
     every American in the founding generation would have shared, 
     because they knew their history.
       ``A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of 
     government. It can exist only until a majority of voters 
     discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the 
     public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always 
     votes for the candidate who promises them the most benefit 
     from the public treasury, with the result being that 
     democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy.''
       This is the lesson we most need to remember today.


                               footnotes

     \1\Notice--8,563 pieces of legislation. That's all of the 
     laws enacted by nine legislatures in the course of 80 years. 
     That comes out to be 80 a year; that is nine laws per year. 
     This is significant. The Framers' concept was that 
     legislation was a simple, clear, direct and straightforward 
     thing. It was limited. That generation did not have such 
     things as omnibus bills.
     For example, the State of Virginia ordered a man named Hening 
     to pull together all of the statutes that had been enacted by 
     Virginia since 1607, nearly 200 years. It took only 13 small 
     volumes to print all of the laws of 200 years. Today, 
     statutes coming out of Congress tend to be long, complicated 
     and detailed.
     \2\Though, in the Declaration of Independence, after the 
     Preamble and when it gets down to all of the ``he hases,'' 
     most of the accusations against George III stemmed from the 
     King's failure to exercise the veto power when he should 
     have. In the Declaration, Jefferson took George III to task 
     for vetoing certain legislation, but also for not vetoing 
     other of parts of other pieces of legislation.
     \3\As for the use of the word ``revision,'' see the 
     constitutions of New York, 1777, Sec. III; Massachusetts, 
     1780, ch. 1, art. III, Sec. 1; Georgia, 1789, art. II, 
     Sec. 10 and 1798 art. III, Sec. 10; Vermont, 1793, ch. II, 
     Sec. 16.
     \4\Some states had adopted such provisions from the 
     beginning; see, e.g., the Maryland constitution of 1776.
     \5\New Jersey Constitution of 1844, art. V, Sec. 7; Ohio 
     Constitution of 1851, art. II, Sec. 16, P3; Kansas 
     Constitution of 1859, art. II, Sec. 14.

  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Chair and yield the floor. And in the 
absence of any other Senator on the floor, I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Dorgan). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________