WASHINGTON — In the arsenal of budget-cutting weapons revered by fiscal conservatives, few are as prized as the line-item veto -- a tool sought by presidents back to Ulysses S. Grant and made popular by Republican icon Ronald Reagan.
That is why, when many conservatives are bitterly disappointed in President Bush for allowing the federal budget to burgeon, GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani have found themselves engaged in an increasingly noisy debate over their commitment to the line-item veto.
Some voters may see the fight as turning on an arcane point of budgeting, but among the Republican faithful, the veto power is seen by many as a litmus test for candidates' commitment to smaller government.
"I like vetoes," Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, said in a television ad earlier this year. "I've vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor. And frankly, I can't wait to get my hands on Washington!"
Romney is not only bragging about how many times he used such a veto, but he also is attacking Giuliani for spearheading a successful 1997 lawsuit while New York mayor to deprive the president of a federal line-item veto.
The issue provided the sharpest point of tension in a debate among GOP candidates Tuesday, and it marks one of Romney's most aggressive efforts yet to undermine Giuliani's claim to be a champion of fiscal discipline.
"Fiscal conservatives are looking for someone who will step up and really demonstrate they would control spending in the White House," said Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. "They were disappointed in the Republican Congress and in President Bush because spending exploded, as did pork-barrel projects, on their watch."
At issue is a central tenet of GOP orthodoxy: Presidents and governors should have the power to veto individual spending and tax provisions of legislation to excise items from bills that they consider wasteful. Reagan made a big push for that power. Republicans kept arguing for it as part of their "contract with America," the manifesto that propelled the party to power in Congress in 1994.
Like more than 40 governors, Romney had line-item veto power when he was governor of Massachusetts, and he says he wielded it 844 times during his four years in office. But he was up against a Democratic-controlled Legislature, which overturned him more often than not. According to an analysis by the Boston Globe, the Legislature restored the money cut through every one of Romney's line-item vetoes during his last year in office.
