DALE MCFEATTERS President's unused veto

President Bush, who hasn't used his veto power at all since taking office, is now threatening to veto two huge authorization bills enormously popular with members of Congress.
His most recent threat is to veto a record $422 billion defense bill because it would delay for two years a round of military base closings that the administration wants to start in 2005. The House approved the bill, 391-34, last week; the Senate has yet to vote on its version, which does not include the delay.
Earlier, the president said he would veto the highway bill if it calls for more than $256 billion in spending over the next year. By generous margins, meaning that a veto might be easily overridden, the Senate approved $318 billion and the House, $284 billion. A joint House-Senate conference committee is ironing out the differences, but the result is almost sure to be more than the White House wants.
The Republican majority in Congress doesn't want to be in the position of repudiating its own president, especially in a presidential-election year, but the lawmakers have their own elections to worry about. The highway bill is packed with individual pet projects that the members love to campaign on. And no lawmaker wants to be charged during a campaign with insufficient vigilance in keeping the local military base open.
Possibilities
The White House could plausibly claim victory on the highway bill if the final amount is something less than the $284 billion the House would spend. One compromise being floated is $275 billion.
On the base-closing delay, the White House left the president a little wiggle room by saying Bush would veto the bill only on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recommendation. The secretary, of course, can be trusted to do right by his boss. But Congress on its own will never agree to close bases, not without political cover, and the savings in military spending could be huge. The Pentagon says that, at a "conservative" estimate, it has 24 percent excess base capacity.
In a sense, Bush got himself into this dilemma by appearing to wink at Congress' -- and his own -- big spending. Now, if he is to have any credibility on spending, he must make good on his veto threat if Congress chooses to confront him.
Scripps Howard News Service