Hand Bush the veto pen

PRESIDENT BUSH asked Congress this week for a line-item veto, and he should get it.

Too often, Congress attaches controversial spending items to bills that are so important they are unlikely to be rejected by either branch or vetoed by the president. This way, projects that couldn't stand direct scrutiny -- such as the infamous Alaska bridge to nowhere approved by Congress last year -- are passed without a vote on their merits. It is only common sense that a president should be able to ask Congress to reconsider such items with an up-or-down majority vote, as Bush is requesting.

With the proposal enjoying support from conservatives such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert and liberals such as Senator John Kerry, and with Congress laboring to clear the ethical cloud hanging over it, the bill has a good chance of passing. But if it is enacted, Congress will have taken only a very small step toward needed ethics reforms.

In some ways, this is an odd time for Bush to be making the proposal. Many in Congress and elsewhere are chafing at what they see as a steady effort by Bush and his top aides to concentrate power in the executive, to the detriment of Congress and the courts. Why give the president more power? Alternatively, there is a danger that Congress might embrace the line-item veto as more of a reform than it is. Neither is a reason to sidetrack the proposal. Governors of 43 states have some version of line-item veto and use it as an integral part of budget-making. It should have been available to presidents for years.

In fact, Congress did approve a line-item veto for President Bill Clinton in 1996, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later on grounds that Congress had violated the Constitution by giving the president some of its inherent power to legislate.

This time, Bush is not asking for a full veto, which would require two-thirds votes in each branch to override, but only for majority votes in each branch to confirm that Congress meant to approve the items he questions.

It may be argued that Congress deliberately follows rules that allow for ''earmarking" and other surreptitious ways of inserting controversial items, often for special interests, and that even the limited line-item veto proposed by Bush would undercut that. But surely Congress has the power, through legislation, to balance its own rules.

Still, the better way to deal with earmarking and other such abuses is for Congress to eliminate them directly. Special-interest money is the big problem in Washington. Public financing of congressional elections is by far the best answer. Short of that, major reforms in the current campaign finance system, regulation of lobbyist activities, and internal ethics enforcement are badly needed.