Judd Gregg: “This amendment we are offering is what we call the second look at waste amendment. It is a child of the original…”

“This amendment we are offering is what we call the second look at waste amendment. It is a child of the original line-item veto, although it is not a line-item veto. As the Congress will remember, we passed the line-item veto in the early 1990s and gave President Clinton that authority. He actually used that authority. It was challenged in court and was found to be unconstitutional. But that line-item veto was passed rather strongly by this Congress and by the Senate, and it was a bipartisan effort, which I hope this will be, to try to allow the executive branch more opportunity to address omnibus bills around here. This proposal that we put forward is not like the line-item veto because it doesn't have the same constitutional impact. It is truly a second look at waste amendment, where we basically say to the executive branch that if you get one of these omnibus bills filled with different initiatives--and these bills can be hundreds of pages long and can involve hundreds of billions of dollars of spending and massive amounts of authorization, and it is not unlikely that there is going to be a fair amount of activity put in there because somebody knows it is an omnibus bill and they know it is going to have to pass and go forward, and even though the language put in may be questionable as to purpose, policy or as to just plain waste, it gets stuck in this--baggage thrown in the train as they say--that baggage can never be looked at.”