【美国精神】第34期

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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 veto¹ 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 override² 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 appropriation³ 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 Supreme⁴ Court, the most powerful court in the US., which decided⁵ 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 repealed⁶ (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.

 

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