Paul Ryan: “If my colleague recalls, the line-item veto was knocked down by the Supreme Court a few years ago, for good reason…”

“If my colleague recalls, the line-item veto was knocked down by the Supreme Court a few years ago, for good reason, which was it is anticonstitutional, it was unconstitutional for Congress to delegate its lawmaking power to the executive branch; and the Supreme Court aptly knocked down that line-item veto law. So what we have come up with in place of it is the ability for the executive, the President of the United States, when he receives these big spending bills, to pull out pieces of spending, pork barrel spending and through an expedited procedure send those pieces of spending, those pork barrel projects back to Congress for an up-or-down vote on each of these procedures, each of these pork barrel projects. We have a procedure here where the President can make sure that he gets that vote. We cannot stonewall, we cannot filibuster it; we have to have a vote on this wasteful spending that the President can take out of these bills and send back to the Congress so we have another up-or-down vote to make sure that we have another chance, a redundant system to go after this wasteful spending. It accomplishes the same thing that a line-item veto does, but it retains the constitutional authority of the lawmaking body and the legislative branch that the Constitution and the Supreme Court calls for.”