Fox News' Chris Wallace had to teach Treasury Secretary Mnuchin that line-item vetoes are unconstitutional

published 25 March 2018

President Trump floated the idea of reviving the line-item veto on Twitter Friday evening, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared on Fox News 36 hours later to echo the proposal.

The subject at hand was the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill Trump signed Friday, a package Mnuchin claimed was excessive only because "the Democrats demanded a massive increase in non-military spending." To trim future bills, he argued, Congress "should give the president a line-item veto."

"But that's been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, sir," Fox host Chris Wallace interjected. Mnuchin was undeterred. "Well, again, Congress could pass a rule, okay, that allows them to do it," he said. "No," Wallace answered, "no, sir, it would be a constitutional amendment." "Chris, we don't — we don't need to get into a debate in terms of — there's different ways of doing this," the treasury secretary sputtered before moving on.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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