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By The Hill Editors
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Posted: 10/24/07 06:50 PM [ET] |
That a Republican president in his last two White House years facing new and triumphant Democratic congressional majorities should threaten more vetoes than he did early in his presidency is no cause for surprise.
But the numbers are stark and quantify Bush’s predicament in a revealing way.
As The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reported in Tuesday’s paper, the most aggressive form of threatened veto is that which comes from the president himself. Threats issued by White House aides or, still more, those which are merely suggested by aides as possibilities (and which can be ignored without loss of face) are naturally regarded as less potent weapons.
In the first six years of his presidency, when Congress was run by Republicans (other than 18 months in the Senate after Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) bolted the GOP), Bush personally issued only 28 veto threats. By contrast, he has made 46 such threats in the nine months since the Democrats started running Congress.
Until recently, Bush was the most veto-averse president in living memory. There came a point, sometime in 2006, when his unilateral veto disarmament appeared so abject that Capitol Hill began wondering whether there was anything it could not get away with. Pressure built on Bush to veto something — anything — to prove that he had the nerve to do so.
Well, there is no unwillingness now, and Bush has used the veto to considerable effect, particularly in blocking Democratic attempts to impose a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. The maneuvering and legislative-versus-executive tussles on the war show that the president still has power. Like then-President Clinton facing the incoming GOP tide in 1995, Bush is still “relevant.”
But the vetoes are also a sign of his weakness at the tail end of his presidency. They are wielded, as several commentators have noted, because the president has little else to wield anymore. He has lost his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, and he has lost the support of about three-quarters of the public, according to opinion polls.
Vetoes are failsafe devices that have to be deployed when measures cannot be blocked by more nuanced means, such as public persuasion. They are the last shots left in the presidential locker.
Still, they are effective shots and the Democrats have not yet worked out how best to deal with them. The majority party hopes to make political capital out of forcing vetoes on bills where they believe Bush is most out of line with public opinion.
They hope that this will push the election needle a year from now, and return not only enhanced Democratic majorities in Congress, but also deliver a new tenant to the White House — one who prefers to sign Democratic legislation rather than veto it.
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