U.S. Senate: Vetoes | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Senate: Vetoes

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26 pointswamatt18 comments

To be fair, recent congresses have actually pushed through so little significant legislation that there's much less to veto.

Seeing these stats broken out as a percentage of legislation that crosses his desk would be much more interesting.

To me, this highlights that the Congress has done so little successfully that they have barely ever even had the chance for Obama to disagree.

I'd like to see a similar chart of # of total bills signed into law by presidents. I'm guessing we'd see Obama to be similarly low for the same reason.

Yeah, if we're looking at senate stats, we should look at the record number of filibusters since Obama's been president.

Part of the reason for it, is the style in which the hyper dysfunctional modern era US Government passes new laws.

They do it almost strictly as a bundling system to guarantee no laws are ever vetoed. Which is how they've managed to pass tens of thousands of new federal laws, with a mere 79 vetoes spanning a quarter century.

Line Item Veto is supposed to help with that. I don't know the mechanics, and if it becomes onerous when a bill has 1000+ pages.

The president was granted line-item veto by congress in the late 90s, when Clinton was in office. It got challenged in court and ruled unconstitutional.

One thing this reflects is the growing uniformity within parties. Democrats have had the Senate for the entirety of Obama's term, so objectionable bills have hit a previous roadblock. Looking at GWB's vetoes, all but one occurred with a Democratic Senate. Similarly, all of Clinton's vetoes occurred after the Republicans took the Senate in 1995.

Edit: To clarify a bit - The Northeastern secular Republican (Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter) and the Southern culturally conservative, pro-social program Democrat (Zell Miller) are both largely casualties of a system where increased awareness in the modern news cycle makes it much easier to paint an individual for the all the actions of their party, leading to a more ideologically pure Senate where all bills that pass reflect the controlling party's ideology.

Personal observation: data makes history much more interesting. FDR's big lead compared to other presidents among them. Quick searching turns up only minimal information on the context surrounding FDR's vetoes (e.g. Wikipedia[1]), but Google has a book hit with a whole chapter that's on-point[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden... [2] http://books.google.com/books?id=B4cwTEJIUBQC&pg=PA171&#...

The reason there are no vetoes anymore is because congress is basically told it's going to happen beforehand, and both sides can then do the math on whether the veto will be sustained.

I think Congress used to be more unruly, unpredictable, and less partisan, so as things got more cut and dried over the years, vetos just stop actually occurring as a practical matter, unless there are points to score politically by making the president go through the motions.

It's really more the heightened power of the minority caucus of the Senate which has recently radically expanded what were previously relatively minor veto points in the path of legislation[1]. It's not quite a liberum veto [2] yet but it has some of the pathologies.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Clo...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

what I I supposed to draw from this post? that vetoes are good / bad? that one prez was better than another?

A little explanation for non-americans would be nice. but even so I am having trouble understanding why this is on HN

Jesus. Can someone explain why FDR's is so high? 635 vetoes, gah.

well, FDR was the only President elected to more than two terms (and some pretty historically significant terms). Grover Cleveland might be more of an outlier, especially as both his two (non-consecutive) terms appear much further from the mean of his era.

EDIT: wikipedia has a section on Cleveland's vetos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland#Vetoes

It's most likely because there was a lot of attempts to dismantle and undo his New Deal. See particularly 1937, I would bet as the year they most occurred, but I could be wrong on that. I am guessing on that year because things were starting to look little better from the Great Depression, so as lot of programs and spending were cut, promptly followed by the economy falling back down.

An additional thought is that FDR was the first really powerful president who made a power grab for the executive branch and so faced resistance from a Congress that was used to being in control.

I believe that vetoes are seen as a sign of political weakness in the modern system.

And yet Republicans paint Obama as uncooperative?

Most cooperativeness, nor lack thereof, occurs before the bill touches a President's desk. A Democratic held Senate more or less means that very little will ever have an opportunity for ink that has already been discussed via press conference, media outlets, etc.

To be fair, Republicans are out of their minds, and have been for the past 30 years or so.

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