Farm Bill Mayhem

Yesterday, I noted that President Bush issued a veto of the $300 billion pork-laden farm bill and was followed up with a House override of the veto by a significant margin as 100 GOPers crossed over to vote for the override.

While all this seems cut and dried, and indeed, I thought that this was all straight forward, someone screwed up in Congress and provided President Bush with a different version of the farm bill than the one that was actually adopted by the House and Senate. The version vetoed by President Bush was missing 34 pages of text.

In other words, he vetoed a bill that didn't reflect the language passed by Congress. I can't think of a situation like this happening before, but the proper resolution would be to resubmit the entire farm bill.

However, Congressional Democrats worry that they're not going to get the GOP to cross the aisle a second time, risking the ire of their constituents, so they're hoping to try a work-around that has never been done before - to simply pass the 30 pages as a separate bill and then watch President Bush vetoes that as well.

Democrats are essentially arguing that Congress can choose to send only portions of bills for a presidential signature or veto. In other words, they're proposing their own version of a line item veto, which the Supreme Court has found unconstitutional. The President has to vote for the entire measure on an up/down tally, and can't simply pick and choose which parts to approve and which parts to veto. Congress has no such ability either.

All this is moot unless the GOP shows some spine and does the right thing in making sure that the farm bill goes down hard to that veto.