Power to the prez:

...The deficit's threats to the economy have to be addressed now, not several years later when a constitutional amendment might finally be adopted...

...This was thought by the Justice Department to be a course that would ultimately be held constitutional...

...The House Budget Committee points out that in California the line-item veto presents a perennial problem with the legislature holding back on appropriations bills until a deal is struck with the governor on the use of his veto...

...So what better idea than to use this newly discovered strength, and arrange that the presidential candidates debate issues of particular interest to women and in a context determined not by men strategists but by women themselves...

...Reagan said, "Now, why couldn't such a system of that kind at the federal level be just as effective as it is at the state level...

...When President Eisenhower submitted his proposal for an item veto amendment to House Speaker Sam Rayburn in 1957, seventy percent or more of the budget was discretionary...

...After all, the state of California is ten percent of the population...

...Reagan, in citing successful state use of the item veto, appears to equate gubernatorial power with presidential and to call upon Congress to pattern itself after state legislatures...

...Women and men show little difference on so-called traditional women's issues like day care, the Equal Rights Amendment, and equal pay...

...The tension between the powers of the president and the 24 February 1984: !03 powers of Congress is the center of energy for our present federal system, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers...

...The item veto may very well be an appropriate election-year symbol of Mr...

...The groundwork was being laid during this critical period for the twentieth-century reliance upon gubernatorial power as the center of energy in state political systems...

...Certainly the administration can only profit from a serious effort at self-scrutiny on its policy on Lebanon and indeed on the entire Middle East...

...It was then that death started to come to the marines, culminating in the terrible terrorist attack that had such a devastating -- and understandable -- effect on American public opinion...

...Under the cosponsorship of Emmanuel and Women in Politics '84, a nonpartisan coalition of individuals and women's organizations formed to maximize women's participation in electoral politics, six Democratic presidential candidates were brought together to debate the gender gap...

...The emergence of a bipartisan national consensus on this issue would be difficult, but it is not totally impossible, and the efforts can only be helpful...

...In short, the possibilities of not only a regional but a world confrontation stemming from our Lebanon policy are all too real...

...Reagan would find little help from his new authority in reducing the deficit...

...Shed was the Stereotype of a Catholic women's college which existed primarily to train young ladies to be good teachers and good housewives for young men coming off the campuses of Boston College in nearby Newton Heights and Holy Cross College in Worcester, forty miles west...

...a college where, as the the New York Times recalled, Cardinal Cushing could stand up some twenty-five years ago and tell Emmanuel students: "Aspire to the Heights, and if you don't reach the Heights, remember there is always the Cross...

...So whose line items are more apt to be struck...

...As observed by Senate Republican Appropriations Chairman Mark Hatfield, "The president could veto each line-item in every appropriation bill and still end up with a deficit of well over $100 billion per year...

...The president and his administration are under political pressures, just as is the Congress...

...This was surely good advice, and Mr...

...But this cannot be...

...Yet Mr...

...At an October 17, 1981, press conference, the day after his appeal to the news editors, the president replied to a question on the item veto by detailing the workings of California's budget...

...Pork-barrel would still exist in appropriations, but it would be at the president's acquiescence and to his advantage...

...Reagan, that "national constituency" is not likely to include many blacks or poor...

...What to do...

...JEREMIAH BARUCH (Jeremiah Baruch is the pseudonym of a Washington writer with a position in government...

...It is naive, at best, to think that the administration's budget decisions are predicated consistently upon the national interest without taking special political interests into account...

...But even if the president had been given the item veto power this year by some spectacular surge that swept the Congress and all the states necessary to adopt an amendment to the Constitution, Mr...

...It works in forty-three states ---let's put it to work in Washington, D.C., for all the people...

...Possessing definite political instincts and opinions, and comprising 53.5 percent of the electorate, women have the potential to teach the two major political parties a costly lesson or two...

...So goes the theme underpinning Mr...

...8 State use of the item veto varies as much as the differing political cultures of each state: the Illinois governor's reduction of a line item becomes law unless overriden by the legislature...

...Twice -- at a press briefing and before TV cameras in welcoming remarks -- she cited McCarthy's observation in a Commonweal column that "almost half the women in the House of Representatives, one of the two women Cabinet members, and many state and local office holders" come from all-women's colleges such as Emmanuel...

...Common weal: ! 04...

...Even worse, with seven thousand Soviet advisers in Syrian territory, there is a real danger of a head-on confrontation between Russia and the United States...

...Most bases were touched -- six times...

...Glenn concurred on the homemakers point, but only in passing...

...Each member of Congress would be required to bargain with the president to obtain local appropriations...

...Reagan's upcoming campaign, as with that of every president, is predicated on rebuilding and maintaining an election coalition that has been nurtured throughout his term...

...Reagan's resolve to cut the federal budget, one that he might not totally appreciate, for he should be flinching all the way to the voting booth...

...This is precisely what happened recently at Emmanuel College in Boston...

...California is one of those forty-three states...

...Benjamin Franklin's argument at the 1787 Constitutional Convention against the absolute veto -- "No good law whatever could be passed without a private bargain with him [the governor of Pennsylvania]" -- would apply with equal force to the item veto...

...This would be a good time to call on former secretaries of state for counsel...

...And if one also puts aside the monies allocated to pay the interest on the debt, the president has recourse only to cutting defense appropriations and foreign assistance, especially military aid -- which is not likely -- or to cutting domestic, nondefense discretionary programs, which amount to only nine percent of the budget...

...Then a great national debate on the issue should take place, in Congress and in the nation...

...Reagan said "no" to the statutory approach and his aides' advice, and proposed his item veto amendment because, as recounted by the Washington Post, he felt it to be a "stronger election-year symbol of his resolve to cut the federal budget" and he was familiar with the device as governor...

...With the marines out of the way, Washington sources say such pressure would take the form of vastly increased naval shelling and aerial bombardment from the United States fleet offshore...

...He has the president's approval rating among women lagging a full nine points behind that of men...

...today, it is less than fifteen percent of the budget...

...As he has on many other occasions, Mr...

...The item veto cannot touch the enormous sums provided in the budget for entitlements since eligible recipients can sue the government for their payments...

...In sum, the convergence was on women as a liberated, unassailable species...

...Any item veto authority would be well used to foster that electoral constituency, and, in the case of Mr...

...In so many ways the setting was as auspicious as the debate itself...

...in order to decide where to go, the nation must look squarely at how we got into our present plight...

...He concludes with the ironic observation that "at the very time that James Bryce and Woodrow Wilson were declaring Congress ascendant in Washington, constitutional changes in the states were empowering governors as never before in American history...

...But he certainly should flinch if the item veto is being portrayed as the answer to the nation's deficits...

...Frequently the governor is the only consistent presence for the operation and oversight of state programs...

...a court suit has held that Indiana's governor must veto a complete section and only in an appropriation bill...

...the Pentagon and the State Department do not see eye to eye on the issue...

...President Reagan' s decision to pull the marines back to the ships offshore may temporarily allay public anxiety and even still the Democratic fervor...

...The marines may be safer, but we are a long way from being out of the woods on Lebanon yet...

...Since a majority of the American people, to say nothing of the Democrats in Congress, seem unpersuaded of the wisdom of what "we set out to do," this can lead only to further division...

...State mechanisms also differ widely as to the governor's veto power over language accompanying appropriations and as to"tile manner in which vetoes may be overridden...

...At the same time, however, he has insisted that the removal of the marines from Beirut "will strengthen our ability to do the job we set out to do...

...In response to the argument that the item veto would expedite appropriations in order to give Congress time to consider vetoed items, the experience of California is quite enough...

...Reagan appears to rely heavily on his experience as governor in assessing national problems...

...Cushing would be run off campus for any such whimsical comment today, and maybe by Emmanuel's president, Sister Janet Eisner, S ND, who appears more given to quoting Abigail McCarthy than archbishops of Boston...

...As governor, I found this 'line-item veto' was a powerful tool against wasteful and extravagant spending...

...In withdrawing the marines Mr...

...Just noting the present level of federal discretionary spending, the analogy begins to fail...

...It is plain that the country is deeply divided on our national course in Lebanon, and it is not even clear that the administration itself is of one mind...

...In arguing for the item veto, the Wall Street Journal states that while Congress "represents diverse interests of 435 districts and various coalitions," the president "represents a national constituency...

...Election '84 CHERCHEZ LA FENNE THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATES I B Y NOW EVERYONE sees it: the gender gap in American politics...

...Reagan's State of the Union proposal for a constitutional amendment that would grant him the executive power he exercised so fondly as governor: "Some forty-three of our fifty states grant their governors the fight to veto individual items in appropriation bills without having to veto the entire bill," he said...

...The president seems to have taken this advice with the apparent goal of shifting the campaign debate over the unprecedented deficits from the substance of the problem to proposals for different ways of dealing with it...

...The first is to seek a broad reassessment of our goals and policy in Lebanon, calling on the best minds available inside and outside Washington and the Republican party...

...Over and above the utter horror that might seize some natives of Manhattan or Kansas City at the thought that the experience of California might be applicable to them, Mr...

...As the respected Congressman Paul Simon of Illinois commented, foreign policy cannot be conducted on the basis of day-to-day public opinion polls...

...And that, fellow Americans, can be accomplished very simply: just give the item veto power to Ronald Reagan...

...Never before had a presidential-candidates' debate been devoted exclusively to the subject...

...In tracing the development of the item veto power from its innovation in the Confederacy in 1861 and the Reconstruction-era constitutions of Georgia and Texas, Professor Gerald Benjamin finds that thirty-six states had given their governors the item veto power within a half century of the Civil War...

...Nonetheless, over the long haul broad popular support for national foreign policy is essential...

...And even when one takes a look at that state experience, it is hardly a flawless record...

...Emmanuel College is an institution which in the early 1970s made a risky but conscious decision not to join the trend of women' s colleges to go coeducational...

...Yes, this can really take place...

...it was not a night to chance comparisons to Cushing...

...A New York Times/CBS poll in December, for instance, had men approving of President Reagan's positions by 57 to 32 percent, but this approval narrowed to 43 to 37 percent among women...

...A Republican congressional countermove to the Democratic resolution on the withdrawal of the marines called on the president instead "to explore other avenues" for a Middle East settlement...

...The point was well made by Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, who was reported to have said, as he held up the deficit-laden FY 1985 Budget which the president himself had submitted to Congress: "The president has all the authority he needs to veto anything in here...

...Unlike Congress, many state legislatures meet irregularly, some as little as a few months every two years...

...It was left to George McGovern, the original pro-feminist among the pack, to speak up for women as homemakers (scattered applause) and to chide women for expecting high office when not enough are even trying for office at the grass roots (silence...

...Instead it committed itself to the education of women, and took on a whole new feminist image...

...After recalling that he suggested his state's system of line-item veto to a disbelieving Speaker O'Neill "when I first came here," Mr...

...Reagan should do two things immediately...

...Washington report POWER TO THE PREZ LATEST SOLUTION TO THE DEFICIT M ORE POWER to the people...

...Not surprisingly, the six Democratic presidential candidates who showed for the debate -- Mondale, Glenn, Hart, Hollings, McGovern and Jackson -- strove to surpass one another in being supportive and sympathetic to women's concerns on everything from pay equity to military spending, the national budget, human services, unemployment, inflation, child care, equal fights, civil fights, foreign policy...

...Reagan should make the line-item veto the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, and he shouldn't flinch from claiming it as the Republican answer to the deficit issue...

...According to reports, this was pointed out to the president and he was offered the alternative of asking for increased power to rescind appropriations once no.w.a," ,02 they have been made...

...This experience might give pause to those members of Congress who have cited the item veto as a solution to the confrontations with the president over threatened vetoes of continuing resolutions with their specter of federal government shutdowns...

...Last year's confrontation between Governor Deukmejian and the Democrati~-con~olled legislature led to a federal courtordered mailing of state welfare and salary checks even though the state was without a budget and the governor without authority to spend...

...All they have to do is give more power to the president...

...but move to other -- arms control and defense, the environment, the delivery of social services, abortion included-- and a significant difference begins to display itself in male/female perceptions and attitudes...

...In one sense this is all ancient history now, and some would argue that we must put it behind us...

...Reagan made it clear that the United States would continue its policies of military pressure on the Soviet Union's client, Syria...

...As early as October 16, 1981, reminiscing over his California experience, he asked visiting news editors, "You . . . wouldn't like to start an editorial campaign to give the president the fight of line-item veto, would you...

...It is too late to undo the errors of the past, but we can at least try to avoid making worse ones in the future...

...This was not the first time Mr...

...This means that Mr...

...A number of them finally responded to his appeal, not the least helpful being the Wall Street Journal, which, in a September 14, 1983, editorial, declared, "Mr...

...Reagan should follow it -- not excluding the possibility of a Geneva-type conference with the USSR and Syria...

...Reagan recalled nostalgically his budget powers as California governor...

...Such shelling and air attacks would be directed not only at the limited areas previously hit but at Syrian-controlled forces anywhere in Lebanon, always with the danger of dragging into the fray our ally Israel with the real possibility of a new Middle Eastern war...

...Secondly, once that top-level review has been concluded, it is essential that Washington's Great Cornmunicator do what he has never done in any systematic way" go before the people, time after time if necessary, to argue the case for whatever Lebanese policy the administration decides on...

...Reagan's own pollster, Richard Wirthlin, documents a gender gap...