Clinton v. City of New York
The Supreme Court struck down the Line Item Veto Act, ruling that letting the President cancel individual spending items and tax breaks from a law he already signed violates the Constitution's lawmaking process.
The decision means Congress cannot hand the President power to unilaterally rewrite bills after enactment; any change to a duly passed law must go back through the full process of passage by both houses and presidential approval.
“There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the President to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”
The core reason the Court found the cancellation power unconstitutional.
How it got here: A federal trial court in Washington, D.C. ruled the Act unconstitutional; the President appealed directly to the Supreme Court under the Act's expedited-review provision.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Congress passed the Line Item Veto Act allowing the President to cancel specific spending items or narrow tax breaks after signing a bill into law. President Clinton used this power to cancel a New York Medicaid tax provision and a tax break for farmers' cooperatives buying food-processing plants. New York hospitals and a farmers' cooperative in Idaho who benefited from those provisions sued, arguing the cancellations were unconstitutional.
The question before the Court
Could Congress give the President the power to cancel individual spending items and tax breaks from bills after signing them into law?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that Congress could not give the President power to cancel individual spending items and tax breaks after signing a bill into law. The Constitution's Presentment Clause requires that a bill become law only after passing both houses of Congress in identical form and being signed or vetoed by the President as a whole; there is no constitutional mechanism for the President to erase parts of a law afterward.
The Court rejected the government's argument that this cancellation power was just like the President's traditional discretion to decline to spend appropriated funds, finding it fundamentally different because it permanently altered the legal text of statutes Congress had passed. Because the President's cancellations effectively created new, shorter laws that Congress never voted on, the Act's procedures were unconstitutional.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Presidents can no longer selectively erase parts of spending and tax bills after signing them, preserving Congress's exclusive control over the exact wording of laws. Cities, states, farmers' cooperatives, and other groups that rely on specific budget or tax provisions can be confident that once a law is enacted, only a new law—not a presidential stroke of the pen—can undo it.
What changes now
The ruling is final on the merits; the Line Item Veto Act's cancellation provisions cannot be used again unless Congress adopts a different mechanism consistent with the Constitution, or the Constitution itself is amended through Article V's process. The lower court's judgment striking down the Act stands, and any future effort to give the President similar cancellation power would need to follow ordinary bicameral passage and presentment for each individual measure.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly did not address whether the Act separately violated separation-of-powers principles by improperly shifting power between Congress and the President, since it resolved the case on the narrower Presentment Clause ground. It also did not rule on the wisdom of line-item veto policies generally.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy agreed the law was unconstitutional but wrote separately to stress that separation of powers protects individual liberty directly, not just the interests of the branches themselves. He argued that letting the President unilaterally reward or punish groups through spending cancellations threatens citizens' liberty even though Congress consented to give up its own power.
Concurrence in part — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia argued the Snake River farmers' cooperative lacked standing because its claimed injury was too speculative, and would not have reached the merits of the tax-benefit cancellation. He agreed the New York plaintiffs had standing but concluded, unlike the majority, that canceling the spending item was constitutional because it was no different from long-accepted congressional grants of spending discretion to the President.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer argued the Act did not literally violate the Presentment Clause because the President was executing, not repealing or amending, laws Congress had written to include cancellation authority. He also argued the Act did not violate separation-of-powers or nondelegation principles, since Congress retained full power to exempt provisions or reinstate cancellations, and history showed Congress had long delegated broad spending discretion to the President.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed whether the challengers had suffered a real, concrete injury sufficient for federal courts to hear the case: New York faced a revived multimillion-dollar tax liability, and the farmers' cooperative lost a bargaining advantage in a pending business negotiation, both of which counted as sufficient injury.
- Turning to the merits, the Court examined the Constitution's Presentment Clause, which spells out the only way a bill can become or be changed into law: passage by both houses of Congress and either signature or veto by the President as a whole, not in pieces.
- The Court found that when the President canceled parts of the two 1997 laws, he was effectively creating new, shorter versions of those statutes that had never been voted on by Congress or presented to him in that form.
- The Court rejected the government's argument that this was just like the President's long-recognized discretion to decline to spend appropriated money, reasoning that canceling a provision permanently erased its legal effect, which is fundamentally different from simply choosing not to spend funds Congress made available.
- The Court also distinguished an 1892 case upholding a law letting the President suspend tariff exemptions when certain facts arose, explaining that there the President was executing a policy Congress had already set, whereas here the President was substituting his own policy judgment for Congress's after the fact.
- Because the cancellation power let the President unilaterally alter the text of already-enacted statutes without following the constitutionally required process for repeal or amendment, the Court concluded the cancellation provisions violated the Presentment Clause.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Field v. Clark (143 U.S. 649)
The Court said this 1892 tariff ruling doesn't apply because there the President merely executed Congress's set policy, not substituted his own.
Reaffirms INS v. Chadha (462 U.S. 919)
The Court relied on Chadha's rule that repealing statutes, like enacting them, must follow the Constitution's exact procedures.