Donald K. Allen for President

Line Item Veto

Our congressmen and women invented a unique way to appropriate money for their own pet projects by adding “earmarks” to any bill presented to them for passage. The way it works is, “I’ll vote for your bill if you allow me to stick on this earmark to create a bike path in Poland, Ohio.” So the bill for funding our troops, or for increasing homeland security, starts to grow with all these add-ons. To pass the bill means to pass everything on it.

For a short period, our President was allowed to exercise a line-item veto, which permitted him to cross off earmarks that he believed were just plain “pork projects.” This saved taxpayers millions of dollars each time he used the line-item veto. Our Supreme Court, however, deemed that the line-item veto was unconstitutional in that it gave the President additional powers that were not intended in our original Constitution.

OK, show me where in our original Constitution that it allows earmarks on congressional bills? It doesn’t. Earmarks should be called, “ticks,” or “leeches,” because that’s what they are. They are simply parasites on a bill that suck blood (i.e. your tax dollars) out of our treasury. As President, I will find a way to make earmarks and any add-on illegal. If we can establish a National Referendum, then the people of this country can vote on whether or not we should reestablish line-item veto power for the President. National Referendums will truly return power to all of us, instead of leaving it in the hands of Congress to continue reaping the harvest of our hard-earned taxes.