34. Who vetoes bills?
Answer:
The President
Explanation:
Congress is the part of the U.S. government that is responsible for making laws.
However, it cannot do it without the president’s help. Every time that the members of
Congress agree on a bill (or an idea for a law), it has to be sent to the president for
his or her approval. If the president does not think that the bill is a good idea, he or
she can veto the bill so that it doesn’t become a law. If Congress still wants that bill
to become a law, it can vote again and if two-thirds (or 67%) of the members agree,
they can override the president’s veto so that the bill becomes a law even though
the president doesn’t like it.
But what happens when the president thinks that some parts of the bill are good but
other parts are bad? U.S. bills can be very long, complex documents that have
hundreds or thousands of pages and cover (or talk about) many different things.
Can the president veto just one or a few things in a bill, but still have the rest of the
bill become law?
That question was being asked a lot in the mid-1990s. Many members of Congress
wanted the president to have line-item veto power, or the ability to veto just single
line items, or small parts, of a larger bill. In 1996, Congress passed a bill called the
Line Item Veto Act of 1996. President Bill Clinton signed it and it became a law. With
this law, the president could veto individual parts of appropriation bills, or bills
about how the government should spend its money. President Clinton used this
power a few times.
However, the members of Congress who didn’t like this law thought that it was
unconstitutional, or went against the United States’ most important legal
document, the Constitution. The issue was presented to the Supreme Court, the
most powerful court in the US., which decided that the line-item veto was
unconstitutional. The Supreme Court believed that the way the Constitution is
written, the president must approve or veto whole bills and not just parts of them. So
in 1998 the Line Item Veto Act was repealed (or taken away so that it was not a law
anymore). President Clinton was the only president who was ever able to make a
line-item veto.