Obama vetos first spending bill

Sun, 01/03/2010 - 3:27pm | posted by Jason Pye

While it’s nothing significant, considering that Barack Obama has gone on quite the spending spree since he was inaugurated one year ago this month, I thought it was interesting that he vetoed his first spending bill much earlier in his presidency than his predecessor:

President George W. Bush waited 4-1/2 years to issue his first veto and used it for the morally fraught issue of stem cell research. President Obama used his veto power for the first time Wednesday, but it was hardly a weighty constitutional clash – he rejected a spending bill that duplicated another spending bill he had already signed.

It was pretty much a housekeeping move, according to the White House. Mr. Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii with his family, released a statement announcing that he had signed a “memorandum of disapproval” of a continuing resolution meant as a stopgap to keep the Defense Department running in the absence of a regular appropriations bill.

Since Congress managed to pass the appropriations bill after all, the continuing resolution was superfluous. Mr. Obama used his “pocket veto” power as outlined in the Constitution for when Congress is out of session. But just in case anyone challenged it, he also said he was returning the spending bill to Congress along with the memorandum of disapproval, as he would do with a normal veto.

George W. Bush would wait until May 1, 2007 to veto his first spending bill (as the article note, this was not his first veto) because of the presence of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Another verison without the timetable was passed later. He would veto three more spending bills, not including farm bills and SCHIP expansion.

This doesn’t mean much, I just found it interesting.