With the passage of the recent COVID-19 relief bill it is obvious that there is no way congress can control pork barrel spending. Just look at all the unrelated items in this bill with money for a museum and other countries.
The problem is no one in the House or Senate has a real incentive to do what is right for the country as a whole. The member of Congress from Oregon does not care what the people in North Carolina think. The senator from Georgia does not care what the people in Arizona think. There is only one elected official that has a real incentive to care what the country thinks as a whole and that is the president of the United States.
The president should have the power to do what is right for the country as a whole. The only way the president could do this is to give the president the power of the line-item veto.
When the president vetoes a line in any bill, that is not the end of it. That one line item can go back to Congress, where it can be debated by itself with nothing attached to it. And if Congress still wants it, they can override the veto.
Giving the president the power of line-item veto would accomplish two things: We could actually cut pork-barrel spending and Congress would create better, more focused bills for the good of the country
Because Congress could still override a line-item veto, members could still compromise with each other to get their projects passed to bring home the money to their particular state. It would just make it so that these “pet” projects would need to be actually valuable to their particular states.
I urge you to do whatever is needed to make the line item veto a law.
Paul Hammond, South Jordan
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/3ptuuuv
Post a Comment