Cut Waste Line by Line—With a Fairness Guarantee So It Can't Be Weaponized
When a wasteful item is buried inside a massive spending bill, the President today faces an all-or-nothing choice: sign the whole thing, pork included, or veto the entire bill and risk a shutdown. Forty-four of the fifty governors already have a line-item veto—the power to strike individual items—but the President of the United States does not.
Congress tried to grant it by ordinary law in 1996, and the Supreme Court struck that law down in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), ruling that it takes a constitutional amendment, not a statute, to do this the right way. So that's what we drafted—with a safeguard built into its core so it can never become a one-sided partisan weapon.
The power to strike individual wasteful items from a spending bill—designed so it can never be used as a one-sided partisan weapon.
A line-item veto in the wrong hands could become exactly the kind of partisan weapon we exist to oppose—a president slashing the other party's priorities while shielding his own. The parity requirement makes that impossible: any cut aimed at one party's items must be matched by a roughly equal cut to every other major party's items in the same bill. The result is a tool that can only be used the way it's supposed to be—to cut genuine pork, evenly, out in the open—not to punish the other team.
This is a discussion draft prepared for review by legislative counsel and for presentation to Members of Congress—proposed constitutional text, not final legislative language. The wording will keep tightening as it moves forward.
We see the Presidential Line-Item Veto and the Balanced Budget Amendment as a natural pair that works best together—the line-item veto is a scalpel for cutting waste, and the balanced budget is the ceiling that makes cutting it matter. We've listed and drafted them separately, though, so that either one can move as fast as the process will allow. Neither is held hostage to the other.
Read the full text, share it, and—most importantly—send it to your Representative. All three are formatted Word documents you can print or attach to an email.
Want both fiscal amendments together? The Balanced Budget page has its own downloads.
An amendment has to be proposed by Congress before any state can ratify it, so the people to contact are your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. Not sure who they are?
A short, specific message from a constituent carries real weight—far more than a mass-produced form letter. Personal calls to a district office count even more.
Here's a letter you can use as a starting point. Make it your own—add a sentence about the pork-barrel spending that frustrates you most. Fill in the bracketed pieces, then paste it into your Representative's contact form or print and mail it.
Consider attaching the one-page summary or the full text (above) so your Representative's office has the actual language in hand.
The founder of the Common Sense for America Party has made a personal commitment to this fight: