[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10916-S10917]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             LINE-ITEM VETO: WHERE ARE THE HOUSE CONFEREES?

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I came to the floor to visit about two 
other items. One is the line-item veto. As the Presiding Officer knows, 
we passed a line-item veto here in the Senate in March. I voted for it, 
as I have on a dozen or 2 dozen occasions previously, because I think 
we ought to have a line-item veto. I voted for the line-item veto when 
President Reagan and President Bush were Presidents because I, as a 
Democrat, think that Presidents, whether Republican or Democrat, ought 
to have a line-item veto.
  The House passed a line-item veto bill on February 6 of this year, 
and the Senate passed a line-item veto bill in March of this year. Now, 
there has been no progress since then because there has been no 
conference between the House and Senate. Why has there not been a 
conference? Because the Speaker of the House, who always told us he 
wants a line-item veto, decided he is not going to appoint conferees. 
So there will be no line-item veto until the Speaker decides he wants 
to appoint some conferees, and there is a conference and agreement, and 
then it comes back to both the House and the Senate.
  Now, some will probably say that this is because the new majority and 
the Speaker may want to put their own spending projects in these bills 
and not have a Democratic President veto them.
  This is a newspaper published on Capitol Hill. It says, ``Gingrich 
Gets $200 Million in New Pork,'' describing what was written, 
apparently, in appropriations bills that will benefit the Speaker. He 
may not want the President to target that $200 million that was written 
into a bill that the Pentagon does not ask to be spent. Maybe the 
President would use a line-item veto to say this is $200 million that 
the taxpayers should not have to spend on things the Pentagon did not 
want.
  I noticed this morning in the Washington Post, ``Extra Pentagon Funds 
Benefits Senators' States.'' It describes in some detail the extra 
funds put in for projects that the Pentagon has not asked for. These 
are things that will be built that the Pentagon says we do not want 
built. But money is added to 

[[Page S 10917]]
those bills to benefit some. The question is, Why would the President 
not have the line-item veto if all of us agree that he should?
  Congressman Bob Livingston, chairman of the House Appropriations 
Committee, said, ``We may not want to give it to this President''--
speaking of the line-item veto--``right at the outset, but let's give 
it to him eventually.'' Those are his words. We may not want to give 
the line-item veto to this President at the outset.
  Speaker Gingrich, on February 6, before the House passed the line-
item veto, said this:

       We have a bipartisan majority that is going to vote for the 
     line-item veto. For those who think this city has to always 
     break down into partisanship, you have a Republican majority 
     giving this to a Democratic President this year without any 
     gimmicks, an increased power over spending which we think is 
     an important step for America, and therefore it is an 
     important step on a bipartisan basis to do it for the 
     President of the United States, without regard to party or 
     ideology.

  More recently, he said, ``My sense is we won't get to it this year.''
  There was a fervent debate by those who wanted the line-item veto. 
Somehow that ardor has cooled. Somehow the line-item veto is less 
important now.
  The Speaker has been on a book tour. There is plenty of time to do 
that all across America and, apparently, to write two books this year, 
and to earn a bunch of money. But, apparently, there is not enough time 
to get to the line-item veto--appoint conferees and get to a line-item 
veto.
  Well, Mr. President, there is an old saying, ``You can put your boots 
in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits.''
  The Speaker can talk about the Contract With America and the line-
item veto, but if he is not prepared to appoint conferees so that we 
can pass a line-item veto, then he continues to stall. I suppose the 
reason for that is he wants his own spending to be written into these 
bills, or so you would think from this kind of report--``Gingrich Gets 
$200 Million in New Pork.''
  Well, I hope that we can come to a bipartisan consensus that the 
House ought to appoint conferees, that the Senate and House should have 
a conference this week, and that the conference should report back the 
conference report at the end of this week. That way we can pass the 
line-item veto.
  Tomorrow, I intend to offer a sense-of-the-Senate resolution on the 
line-item veto to the State Department authorization bill. My amendment 
would say: It is the sense of the Senate that the Speaker of the House 
should move to appoint conferees on S. 4 immediately, so that the House 
and Senate may resolve their differences and we can pass a conference 
report.
  I do not understand what this is all about if it is not dragging your 
feet to protect more Federal spending that you want for your district 
in this bill. I thought we had decided on a bipartisan basis that a 
line-item veto was good for this country. We voted for it, believed in 
it, and wanted to give it to this President. I voted for it with 
Republican Presidents in office and I voted for it again. I would like 
this President to have it. So I intend tomorrow to offer a sense-of-
the-Senate resolution and ask Senators to vote to send a message to the 
Speaker that if you have plenty of time to run around the country on a 
book tour, you have time, in my judgment, to appoint conferees.
  How do you do it? Simple. Think of the names of a few of your friends 
and then pick some. That is not rocket science; that is just appointing 
conferees, which we do every day in the House and Senate.
  There will be a bill coming to the floor in a few days that 
authorizes Defense spending. That bill includes a type of spending that 
is especially, in my judgment, appropriate for a line-item veto. We 
have something called star wars in this country. It has a better name 
now; it is not star wars, or ABM, antiballistic missile defenses; now 
it is BMD, ballistic missile defense system. That is a new acronym for 
the same old boondoggle. It is something that costs $30 or $40 billion, 
and it will protect against an adversary that no longer exists. But 
each one of these missile defense programs has a constituency that 
somehow seems unable to shut the program down. The Soviet Union is 
gone. That was the antagonist for which the ABM system was designed. 
The Soviet Union does not exist anymore. But the people who want to 
build a star wars program continue to plug away.
  They added in the Senate Armed Services Committee $300 million extra 
for national ballistic missile defense, and then they said let us 
essentially change the ABM treaty, abrogate the treaty, No. 1 and, No. 
2, let us go for accelerated interim deployment in the year 1999 and 
final deployment by 2002. Well, this $300 million is a perfect example 
of what the President ought to use a line-item veto on.
  I intend to offer an amendment on the floor of the Senate to strip 
this $300 million out of the Defense authorization bill. It does not 
make any sense to spend $300 million we do not have on a project we do 
not need. This is exactly why this President ought to have a line-item 
veto. The notion that we do not have enough money for an entitlement 
for a poor kid to have a hot lunch in school, but we have enough money 
to stick $300 million extra in a bill for star wars--I do not know what 
people are thinking about around here.
  So I want to alert my colleagues that I am going to offer an 
amendment to cut this national missile defense funding. But more 
generally, this provision is exactly why we need a line-item veto.

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