Bush Wants More Power

One of the most incompetent presidents in our nation's history thinks he can get it right if Congress will simply hand him over more power. He couldn't get Katrina right so he complained that if only he had more authority to use the military, he would have gotten it right. Yeah. Sure. The videotape of Bush being informed about Katrina simply shows us he couldn't be bothered to use the powers he had. Now the New York Times reports that Bush wants a line-item veto:

President Bush today proposed legislation to create a line-item veto, a measure he said would help restrain government spending by allowing him to strip out pork-barrel spending.

Congress passed a line-item veto in 1996, but two years later, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that it represented an unconstitutional intrusion into powers granted exclusively to the legislative branch. Mr. Bush said his new bill was drafted in a way that would avoid the court's objections.

An administration official later said that the new bill would send vetoed items back to Congress, which could then reinstate them by majority vote, rather than the traditional two-thirds margin, as the 1996 bill had required.

Mr. Bush today cast the proposal, which he has favored since his first presidential campaign in 2000, in terms of its ability to help hold down money spent by "earmarks" — spending inserted into larger bills by individual members of Congress, usually for projects that benefit their home districts. The total amount spent by earmarking has soared in recent years, leading to a new effort in the Senate to rein them in, which Mr. Bush said today he supported.

President Bush, with the help of Karl Rove, is famous for rewarding his friends and punishing his political enemies (even Republicans); a line-item veto is simply an invitation for Bush to abuse his power even more. And the idea that Bush is some kind of reformer is rather ludicrous this late in the game. Bush is going to reform the Republican Party? I know Bush is getting desperate, but he shouldn't try so hard to be a parody of himself.

We need real reform in Washington, not shell games and not power grabs by the president and not smoke and mirrors by way of public relations that massages Bush's image without real changes taking place.