Let's hope you're right OJ and this is just an effort to boost Bush's bonafides with the small government crowd. However, the GOP in the House (and Senate) are not adverse to spending money and the article notes that there is no guarantee this will make it past the Senate anyway.

What politician can ever shy away from telling someone that he has to give money to a 3d person?

The highway bill is the perfect place to start. If the GOP congresscritters can't live with the limitation Bush gave them (months and months ago), then they deserve a veto.

And ditto on the Democrats, who must be insane to be anything but friendly and almost supine in these last few weeks prior to Nov. 2.

The Congress will never let Bush, or any President, have a line-item veto which is an absolute necessity for any fiscal discipline.

Bart:

They did. The Court held it unconstitutional.

OJ,

What occured is what I refer to as the Flip Wilson manuever. The Congress, fully cognizant that the Supreme Court will declare a line-item veto unconstitutional(Article I) passed it anyway. This way they can go home to their constituents and when questioned about the lack of fiscal discipline they can reply, 'We tried to change it. We even passed the line-item veto. But it was that damn Supreme Court which kept us from doing so.' (The Devil made me do it)

The same thing happened with the Flag Desecration Law. It's a cynical gambit to placate the yokels back home.

Bart:

Change a justice or two and both are constitutional. In other words, next year.

Only two of the 9 judges on the Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats. There is no reason to assume that the party that gave us Stevens, Souter,and O'Connor will do any better this time. It was the GOP that gave us Harry Blackmun, Earl Warren and William Brennan.

Congress is very jealous of its privilege to loot the taxpayer in the most creative ways imaginable, and will insure that no judge gets in the way.

If the GOP does through some miracle of clarity manage to appoint another Thomas or Scalia, then one of the mushy moderates, like Kennedy or O'Connor, will have a change of heart and become a total liberal in order 'to maintain the Court's balance.' O'Connor is so dumb that she hasn't quite yet figured out what country's Supreme Court she sits on. The use of foreign precedent should alone have justified her impeachment.

The Court always changes to suit the dominant political ideology, it just takes a few years.

The Court is still stuck in the 60s as far as I can see. And I see no hope of it changing.

in the 30s it was "stuck" in the 1890s, it came unstuck.

Only because FDR threatened 'court packing,'and got a sufficient majority in the Senate of like-minded Senators to let him pack the Court with hacks like Black and Douglas.

Is Bush in a similar position? Forgetting about Democrats, he still has to deal with Chafee, Snowe, Specter and Collins in his own party and a Democratic party that is as addicted to filibustering as Darryl Strawberry was to cocaine. Does Bush have the imperious arrogance that FDR displayed which allowed him to do what he did?

One post-election trial balloon I would throw out is amending the Constitution making judges elected for a term of years.

Yes, he is.