Note 28. Where Did the Vetoes Go?

Trace Evidence of Larger Changes in Policy Making

The number of vetoes issued in each two-year Congress is illustrated in Figure 28-1. It will be of no surprise that vetoes are more common when there is divided party control of Congress and the White House. There may be some surprises, too, as with Truman’s difficulty with a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats and Eisenhower’s objections to a sizable number of measures passed by a Republican Congress with which he did not fully engage.

In this short Note, I focus on the declining frequency of vetoes, whether or not the president and Congress are controlled by the same party. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama vetoed more bills when the other party controlled Congress, but both had remarkably few vetoes by historical standards. What is going on? Our best answers are somewhat speculative.

The Numbers

One possibility, of course, is that Congress sends fewer bills to the president so that the numbers reported in Figure 28-1 are somewhat misleading. Figure 28-2 shows that some of the decline in the number of vetoes is associated with fewer bills being passed. Nevertheless, there has been a declining percentage of Congress-passed measures that are vetoed since World War II. The correlation between the two series is 0.93.

Congressional Partisanship

Rather than generating more vetoes, partisanship may be keeping vetoes to a minimum. The logic of this may seem convoluted, but I find it persuasive. Decades ago, when committees took the lead in pushing through legislation that they favored, bills could make it through Congress without much input from party leaders or the White House. Even if a veto was threatened, as it often was, advocates of the legislation might find the political benefits of supporting legislation, perhaps in the form of getting credit with an important constituency, sufficient to justify the effort.

In recent Congresses, certainly in the Congresses since Gingrich was elected speaker in 1995, party leaders take a central role in setting the legislative agenda and even give direction to committees and their chairs. When majority leadership is of the same party as the president, the leadership coordinates closely with the White House and seldom allows measures to be considered that will produce a veto. When the majority leadership is of the opposite party as the president, the leadership is likely to pursue strategies to avoid vetoes, such as packaging legislation into larger bills. The narrowing agenda and packaging strategies both reduce the number of bills and reduce the number of vetoes.

Partisanship also stimulates obstructionism in the Senate, which allows a minority to block legislation. As a result, many of the partisan, controversial measures die in the Senate before they can be sent to the president for signature or veto. Indeed, more bills die in the Senate than in the House. In fact, there have been many cases in which Senate minorities have obstructed action on a measure in order to protect a president who otherwise might be asked to veto a popular bill.

Presidential Calculations

At the same time, presidents’ veto calculations may have changed. As presidents have faced a more difficult Congress and acquired more partisan electoral coalitions, they have increasingly acted unilaterally to impose policies of their own or to minimize the effect of legislation provisions they dislike. Presidents do so in many ways: Issuing executive orders; encouraging the promulgation of new or revised regulations; using signing statements to announcement his or her views of how new law is to be interpreted; issuing presidential directives and other statements to indicate White House priorities; refusing to defend law in court when it is challenged by private actors. All of these strategies are pursued with the assistance of the president’s appointees in the White House and executive agencies, and are protected when president’s party controls one chamber of Congress or can successfully filibuster in the Senate.

Presidents pursue their strategies under general executive powers asserted under the Constitution. Over time, presidential assertions of power have exploited the ambiguities of the constitutional framework and more aggressively pursued policy without, or even contrary to, legislative authorization. Gridlock in Congress has encouraged and rewarded this. Anticipating problems with Congress, presidents with increasing frequency move preemptively to alter policy, which, in some circumstances, will reduce the incentive for Congress to act. Presidents have exploited Congress’s inability to act by acting unilaterally, often checked only by the courts.

If all of that is true (it is), then the circumstances in which the president’s cost-benefit calculation favors exercising the veto have declined in number. Legislation is less likely to be favorably revised and passed and the options to act unilaterally have expanded. 

A Final Thought

So what happened? Many things. The evolving veto record is the by-product of broad changes in national policy making. Congressional and presidential partisanship, along with centralized policy making in Congress, Senate obstructionism, passing fewer but larger bills, and presidential unilateralism, generate conditions that less frequently prompt a veto. Complex processes yield a record that is easily misread. The veto record certainly does not reflect the weakening of the presidency.