By John McCain
Friday, November 7 1997; Page A25

As soon as President Clinton exercised his line-item veto authority to eliminate 38 building projects in 24 states from the Military Construction Appropriations Act, staunch supporters of the line-item veto cried foul. Outraged charges of partisan political motivation have been heard all over Capitol Hill, and the bill disapproving the president's actions passed in the Senate on Oct. 30 by a vote of 69 to 30. The House has yet to act.

In my view, however, these charges of partisan politicization are somewhat off the mark. After reviewing the actions taken thus far on six appropriations measures for FY 1998, my concern is not that the president has used the line-item veto for partisan advantage but that he has used it so sparingly and so capriciously, thus creating the impression that his purposes were political.

To date the president has vetoed 70 items from six appropriations bills, for a total savings to the taxpayer of $1.3 billion. This amounts to less than four-tenths of one percent of the total funding in these bills. Even a cursory review of these six measures would reveal many other projects that, if vetoed, would reduce the deficit without harming the national interest or impairing any essential government functions – the basis for utilizing the line-item veto as specified in the act.

The administration's process for determining which items to veto appears arbitrary at best. It has no established, consistent and objective criteria against which all programs are evaluated, nor are these criteria clearly stated in advance of veto action. These problems are clearly evident in the two defense spending bills from which items have been vetoed.

In the Department of Defense bill, the president said that in selecting 13 items to veto he considered whether a program would contribute to national security. Yet he chose not to eliminate programs that clearly have no relevance to national security, such as a $250,000 earmark to transfer commercial shipbuilding technology to the Navy, coupled with language creating a 30-year monopoly for a cruise line in Hawaii, and $100,000 to preserve a Revolutionary War gunboat discovered on the bottom of Lake Champlain.

I fully supported the president's veto of the military construction projects, but I could argue that each of those projects is more militarily relevant than the many projects that were not vetoed from the defense bill.

For both defense bills, the president stated that he considered whether the program is included in or fit with the Pentagon's long-range defense plans. Yet in the military construction bill, he failed to veto one project that is not included in the Pentagon's long-range construction plan, while vetoing 32 projects that are in the plan. In the Defense Department bill, he did not veto dozens of projects that are not included in the long-range plan, but did veto one project that is included in the plan. The inconsistency is obvious.

More difficult is verifying that the stated review criteria were actually used. In the energy and water bill, the president stated that he looked for projects that (1) were not requested, (2) were new starts, (3) were not cost-beneficial, (4) provided recreation for a limited number of people, (5) were local-level or (6) corporate subsidies. With this broad set of criteria, only eight projects were vetoed from a $21 billion bill.

In the Treasury/Postal bill, the president vetoed only one item – a provision that would have permitted federal civil servants to change pension plans. His only stated criterion for selecting this single project from the $23 billion bill was that it was added in conference – a factor that had borne little weight in his decisions on other programs that were added in conference but not vetoed.

Finally, publicly announcing the criteria used to select veto items at the same time as the veto list is announced only feeds suspicions that the criteria were developed or tailored to fit this list.

I do not yet see convincing evidence that purely partisan politics played a significant role in the president's decisions to veto certain items and spare others. But his actions clearly indicate that something other than established, objective, consistently applied criteria influenced his vetoes. Clearly, the president's veto of projects from the transportation and VA/HUD bills – affecting 21 Republicans, four Democrats and one independent member of Congress – feeds this charge of political motivation.

Unfortunately, even the appearance of politicization of the line-item veto authority is counterproductive to the purposes for which the authority was enacted. It also jeopardizes the future of this important deficit-reduction tool and severely damages the credibility of the president's efforts to balance the federal budget.

As one who fought for 10 years to enact the line-item veto, I urge the president in the strongest terms to develop and make public a set of objective criteria by which he intends to judge the remaining appropriations bills.

The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.