| Chapter 1: | The Veto and Presidential Influence |
It grants the president the power to veto legislation passed in the House and the Senate. This veto is sometimes referred to as anegative power because it allows the president to simply attempt tostop a bill from becoming a law; it does not provide the executive branch of government with thepositive power to directly shape legislation other than by causing Congress to reconsider legislation and then resubmit repassed legislation that meets the president’s concerns. Thus, the veto is mostly a blunt-force power that provides presidents with a take-it-or-leave-it option: either accept the bill and sign it, or veto it and allow Congress to attempt to invoke its constitutional power to override the president’s veto with a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate.
Despite the Founding Fathers’ suspicion of strong executive power, the veto power was granted to the president to counteract attempts by Congress to encroach on executive power, and to stop any ill-conceived, unjust, or unconstitutional legislation that might be passed by Congress. Indeed, the fact that the representational basis of Congress is necessarily narrow and focused on small geographic districts and states might cause legislation to be insufficiently responsive to the “public good,” and the veto would allow the president an opportunity to check the “institutional pathologies to which Congress is particularly susceptible” (Cameron 2000, 17), that is, the tendency to favor parochial interests over the national interest. From this perspective, the president is conceived of as a necessary bulwark in the U.S. system, one focused on the “common good,” whose use of the veto is meant to restrain congressional weaknesses. James Bryce expressed this somewhat heroic view of the president’s role in the political system (and the dismal role of Congress) in this way: