For just the fourth time during his nearly seven years in the White House, President George W. Bush has deployed the presidential veto, killing legislation that would fund expanded children's health insurance. The move occasioned little surprise -- Bush had promised the move -- but nonetheless presents a perplexing mystery. How could so determined and polarizing a chief executive get so deep into his term in office with so few vetoes? And why has the veto -- once a potent instrument of executive power -- become all but irrelevant?
In recent times, the veto has become a sign of weakness rather than strength, a signal that the president lacks the influence to advance his agenda. What Eisenhower proudly called his "veto pistol" now seems like a pathetic pop gun. It is hardly surprising, then, that the current president, one especially keen to preserve the preeminence of his office, would be reluctant to reveal such impotence.
Ironically, the recent decline of the veto actually signals the monumental growth of presidential power since the 1930s. From the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt through the Dwight Eisenhower's two terms, presidents deployed the veto with unprecedented frequency in their efforts to establish the supremacy of the executive branch. With that mission accomplished by 1960, subsequent chief executives have been reluctant to brandish the veto plan, coming to view it as a confession of weakness.
Bush's paltry three vetoes compare with 37 for his predecessor, Bill Clinton. The president's father, George H. W. Bush, gave the nugatory, to 44 bills in just four years and office. Ronald Reagan notched 78, Dwight Eisenhower 181, plain-talkin' Harry S Truman 250. You have to go back to the earliest history of the republic -- the administrations of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to find numbers comparable to the current incumbent.
It was Andrew Jackson who first turned the veto into a vehicle of executive power. Issuing more vetoes than all of his predecessors combined, Jackson expanded the power of the presidency, giving it critical new authority in economic policy. He also anticipated the current incumbent's controversial signing statements -- the documents in which the President Bush voices his objections and unwillingness to enforce provisions of laws he has signed -- by asserting presidential prerogative to ignore or counteract policies he deemed unconstitutional
But Jackson's dirty dozen vetoes paled before the record of the all time champion, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who rejected 635 acts of Congress. Of course, FDR spent more years in office than other president, but even accounting for his 12 years in the White House, Roosevelt's tally dwarfs nearly all of his fellows. That so enormously popular a president working with strong Congressional majorities for his party would dispense vetoes so freely sheds light on the subsequent decline of this once hallowed instrument of checks-and-balances.
When FDR took office, the Congress remained the nation's preeminent policymaking branch. To be sure, presidents such as William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson had strengthened the office, giving the executive a stronger role in initiating legislation, managing the press, and establishing budgets. But most of the detailed business of making policy and the power of the purse remained on Capitol Hill. The president proposed; the Congress disposed.
Over the course of his presidency, FDR enlarged the scope and scale of the executive branch. Staffing scores of new agencies and bureaus, his administrators developed detailed proposals, controlled large budgets, and implemented national policy. Securing such expanded authority required an extended, sometimes contentious negotiation with the Congress, more often than not with members of FDR's own Democratic Party. Roosevelt's successors -- Truman and Eisenhower also vetoed bills at a healthy rate. Indeed, in the generation spanning FDR's election in 1932 and John F. Kennedy's in 1960, the veto helped to stake out a new role for the executive branch as the preeminent force in American politics. Since the 1960s, no president, not even those facing an opposition-dominated Congress, have had to assert this prerogative to the same degree.
The veto has thus become a desperate measure, the marker of a president -- often a lame duck entering the final stages of his administration -- whose power has diminished. President Bill Clinton nearly admitted as much in a September 2000 news conference, when he expressed frustration with having to use his veto power.
Asserting executive power more extensive than almost all of his predecessors, George Bush has shied away from the veto and confession of impotence it implies. But today, finding himself with few alternatives, Bush is likely to keep wielding this once-prominent, now anemic tool of executive power.
Bruce J. Schulman is Professor of History at Boston University and the author of The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society, (DaCapo Press)