Huffington Post admits NDAA permits indefinite detention

lsayre wrote:And here it is from the ACLU's perspective:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-secur ... ention-law

samhill wrote:Jpete, there is a provision for line item veto but it might just be on certain types of bills & from the sounds of it this one could have been overridden anyhow.

Presidents of the United States have repeatedly asked the Congress to give them a line-item veto power, but in all such cases, either the Congress have refused or the Supreme Court of the United States has stripped them of it after they received it from Congress. According to Louis Fisher in The Politics of Shared Power, Ronald Reagan said to Congress in his 1986 State of the Union address, "Tonight I ask you to give me what forty-three governors have: Give me a line-item veto this year. Give me the authority to veto waste, and I'll take the responsibility, I'll make the cuts, I'll take the heat." Bill Clinton echoed the request in his State of the Union address in 1995.

The President was briefly granted this power by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, passed by the Congress to control "pork barrel spending" that favors a particular region rather than the nation as a whole. The line-item veto was used 82 times in 11 Bills from the federal budget by President Clinton.[3][4]

However, United States District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled on February 12, 1998, that unilateral amendment or repeal of only parts of statutes violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998, by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court in the case Clinton v. City of New York. The case was brought by the then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

An amendment to the Constitution that would give the president line-item veto power has been considered periodically since the Court declared the 1996 act unconstitutional.