Bill Clinton: “I think that my staff is going to brief you about it, but let me say that they have--the relevant Cabinet and staff…”

“I think that my staff is going to brief you about it, but let me say that they have--the relevant Cabinet and staff members have gone over this quite extensively. Keep in mind, the primary use of the line item veto overwhelmingly was meant to be in the appropriations process, which is not even started yet. I don't have the first appropriations bill. There are only a few spending items in this balanced budget that are part of the so-called entitlements process, so that--for example, you had the New York Medicaid provision there on provider taxes. With regard to the taxes, there were some 79 items certified to me, but that was only because of their size, that is, the number of people affected by it. Of those 79, 30 or more were actually recommendations by the Treasury Department to fix flaws in the present laws or to ease the transitions in the tax laws. And another dozen or more were put in by Congress by agreement with the Treasury Department to fix procedural problems in the law. Then there were a number of others that I agreed were good policy. So these are the ones that I think--and then there were several others that I might have line-item-vetoed, but they were plainly part of the understandings reached with Congress as a part of the budget process. So these seemed to me to be the ones, after being briefed by my staff, that both involved significant amounts of money and met the three criteria that I mentioned. And I believe it was the appropriate thing to do.”