US President Donald Trump on Friday abandoned a threat to shut down the US government, signing off on a budget despite being “unhappy” with many of its provisions — and warning he would not back anything similar ever again.
He later tweeted his desire to have a “line-item veto” over future bills that would allow him to remove parts he disagrees with — a measure that would alter the balance of the government and was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1998.
A visibly aggrieved Trump capped another anarchic week by approving the US$1.3 trillion deal passed by US Congress, just hours after threatening to veto it.
He fumed that a “crazy” lawmaking process had produced a bill that “nobody read” — but said he was signing it as a “matter of national security.”
“There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill,” he said in a hastily arranged and meandering address.
“There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced,” Trump said. “But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again.”
He later riffed on the same theme on Twitter, saying: “To prevent this omnibus situation from ever happening again, I’m calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all govt spending bills!”
Congress passed a short-lived Line Item Veto Act in 1996, giving then US president Bill Clinton the power to scratch items from spending bills as a means to rein in fiscal excesses.
The law was challenged and later struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling that found it unconstitutional, because it enabled the president to amend the text of statutes, the task of the legislative branch.
US presidents retained the power of veto over bills, but without the ability to pick and choose which elements to retain.
Without his signature, hundreds of thousands of civil servants would have been put on forced leave, national parks from the Grand Canyon to Yellowstone would have faced closure and nonessential services would have stopped.
It would have been the third shutdown of this year, something lawmakers from both parties had worked hard to avoid.
Earlier on Friday, Washington let out a collective gasp when Trump threatened to veto the hard-won agreement, which dramatically expands military funding.
Trump’s threat came after a host on conservative TV channel Fox News pilloried the deal as a Washington “swamp budget.”
The last-minute drama only fueled a sense of chaos emanating from a White House that seems to lurch from crisis to crisis.
This week alone the former reality TV star replaced his national security adviser, launched a new trade fight with China and needled investigators probing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
At the same time, he faced an unprecedented number of scandals — from a defamation lawsuit to allegations of at least two extramarital affairs.
The centerpiece of the legislation is a US$61 billion increase in US defense spending and a 10 percent hike in domestic spending, which would rise to US$591 billion.
The bill provided US$1.6 billion for border security and construction or repair of nearly 160km of border fencing, but that was far less than Trump had been seeking.
It leaves intact funding for women’s health provider Planned Parenthood, a target of relentless criticism from anti-abortion Republicans.
However, it set aside the issue of the so-called “Dreamers,” immigrants taken illegally to the US as children who were protected under regulations enacted by former US president Barack Obama.
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