Legislative Line Item Veto Act of 2006: Background and Comparison of Versions

Publication Date: July 2006

Publisher: Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service

Author(s):

Research Area: Government

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Abstract:

Under current law, the President may propose to rescind funding provided in an appropriations act by transmitting a special message to Congress. If Congress ignores the presidential rescission request, or if either house rejects the request, the funds must be released after 45 days of continuous session. Instead of allowing Congress to ignore such requests, "expedited rescission" requires at least one house to vote on presidential proposals. Expedited rescission bills have attracted supporters over the years, because the approach is generally regarded as transferring less power from Congress to the President than most other ways of altering the rescission framework. For three consecutive years in the early 1990s, the House passed an expedited rescission bill.

President George W. Bush has repeatedly called for granting line item veto authority to the President, and an Administration draft bill incorporating the expedited rescission approach was sent to Congress on March 6, 2006. That bill, the Legislative Line Item Veto Act (LLIVA) of 2006, was introduced the following day as S. 2381 and H.R. 4890. Other expedited rescission measures pending in the 109th Congress contain similar provisions, including H.R. 2290 (Section 311), H.R. 4699, H.R. 5667 (Title I), S. 2372, and S. 3521 (Title I).

On June 14, 2006, the House Budget Committee voted 24-9 to report H.R. 4890, as amended, favorably. The next day the Rules Committee voted 8-4 to report an amended version in effectively the same form as that approved by the Budget Committee. On June 22, 2006, the House approved H.R. 4890 by a vote of 247-172.

Meanwhile, on June 14, 2006, Senator Judd Gregg, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and others held a press conference to unveil the Stop Over Spending Act, which contained a modified version of the LLIVA in Title I, as well as other budget process reforms. On June 15, 2006, the bill was introduced as S. 3521, and on June 20, the Senate Budget Committee voted 12-10 to report the bill, as amended, favorably.

This report provides a comparative overview of some major features in three versions of the LLIVA -- H.R. 4890/S. 2381 as introduced, H.R. 4890 as passed by the House, and Title I of S. 3521, as ordered to be reported by the Senate Budget Committee -- with provisions in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-130), which the Supreme Court held unconstitutional in 1998.

This report will be updated when action is taken regarding any of the relevant bills or as other events warrant.