Line-Item Veto

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is pleased to read that President Bush wants to revive legislation and possibly push a Constitutional Amendment for a line-item veto power for the President. Oh! Here is the link: Bush Wants Line-Item Veto to Be Revived.

This is the first Constitutional Amendment proposed in your Maximum Leader's lifetime that he has supported. (Depending, as one can imagine, on the wording of such an Amendment.) Your Maximum Leader remembers helping take down names on a petition to give to his then-Congressman Stan Parris urging him to support giving President Reagan a line-item veto power.

For those of you who do not know, the line-item veto is the power of an executive to veto a specific line of an appropriations bill. And in case you don't know, the federal budget contains millions upon millions of lines. A line series of lines might look like this:

Line 12345 Funding for NIS Study proving that Monkey's clench their jaws when they are shot at with M-16 - $2,000,000.00
Line 12346 Funding for Body Armour for troops serving in combat in Iraq - $10,000,000.00
Line 12347 Funding for construction of 8 lane highway connecting Shit Hollow, West Virginia to Bumphuque, West Virginia - $3,000,000,000.00

While these are not actual lines from a budget, your Maximum Leader is sure that his exceptionally bright minions get the idea.

As it stands, the President of the US must accept appropriations bills as they are, or veto the whole lot. Your Maximum Leader has always been in favour of extending to the President the powers that most of our state governors have (and say they can't live without).

And the fact that Robert Byrd opposes the line-item veto makes your Maximum Leader want to give the President the power even more.

BTW, the Reuters article to which your Maximum Leader linked called Senator Byrd "a staunch defender of the rights of the legislative branch." ACK! Those words make your Maximum Leader want to vomit. Robert Byrd is a staunch defender of the legislative branch abrogating their responsibilities to legislate. We never hear about him complain when budget bills aren't passed in time. We never hear him complain about unprecedented use of "Senatorial" privledge to block any and all actions of that august body. Robert Byrd should go back to West Virginia and allow our Republic to exist without his input.

Carry on.