OPINION: Obama's engaging in frugality theater

George Will is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.

Barack Obama, an unbeliever genuflecting before the altar of frugality, is asking Congress to give him something like a line-item veto. Coming in today's context of his unrelenting agenda of expanding government, his proposal constitutes a counterfeit promise to get serious about controlling spending and the deficit. His purpose is to distract the public while Democrats enact something like Stimulus III.

Obama's Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act confirms the axiom that the titles of bills are utterly uninformative. The act would aggravate a distortion of the Constitution that has grown for seven decades, enlarging presidential power by allowing presidents to treat spending bills as cafeterias from which they can take what they like and reject the rest.

Under the proposal, presidents would list dubious spending, then Congress would have to accept or reject, by a simple majority, his entire list, which could not be filibustered. This might, or might not, be constitutionally problematic.

It certainly would not reduce deficit spending: If Congress kills the projects on the president's list, the budgetary allocation would not be reduced, so legislators could dream up new things on which to spend the money.

In 1996, when a Republican-controlled Congress gave President Bill Clinton, by statute, a line-item veto, Pat Moynihan's intervention in the Senate debate began: "I rise in the serene confidence that this measure is constitutionally doomed." The Supreme Court proved Moynihan prescient.

That law's constitutional infirmity was that it empowered the president to cancel provisions of legislation, violating the separation of powers. The Constitution says "every bill" passed by Congress shall be "presented" to the president, who shall sign "it" or return "it" with his objections. "It" means all of the bill, not bits of it.

Even if Congress enacted Obama's proposed "expedited rescission," and even if the law passed constitutional muster, it would be inconsequential as a control on spending. Actually, it probably would make matters worse.

Today, 62 percent of federal spending goes to entitlements and debt service. Both will be growing portions of budgets, and both are immune to any vetoes. Defense and homeland security are 21 percent of the budget and will be almost entirely immune. So the line-item veto's target would be at most 17 percent of the budget.

Furthermore, Obama's law would encourage legislators to feel free to appropriate even more irresponsibly, because it would locate responsibility in the presidency. And presidents could decline to veto particular spending projects in exchange for the sponsoring legislators' support on other matters.

Presidents resent having to choose complete acceptance or rejection of gargantuan spending bills. In 1789, the First Congress' only appropriations bill was 142 words long; Ronald Reagan argued for a line-item veto by brandishing a 43-pound, 3,296-page bill.

Obama probably hopes his proposal will divert attention from a slew of spending that constitutes something that dare not speak its name - Stimulus III. After George Bush's $168 billion Stimulus I in 2008, the Obama administration predicted that its $862 billion Stimulus II would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8 percent. Unemployment is now 9.9 percent. Hence Stimulus III. Like Stimulus II, its scores of billions in spending will enlarge the deficit in order to disproportionately benefit spendthrift state and local governments and their unionized employees.

Last year, Obama ordered 15 department heads to find economies totaling $100 million - 0.0029 percent of federal spending. His new rescission proposal also is frugality theater, and is similarly frivolous.