Trump reverses threat to shut down govt
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump abandoned a threat to shut down the US government Friday, signing off on a budget despite being ‘unhappy’ with many of its provisions — and warning he won’t 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 Supreme Court in 1998.
A visibly aggrieved Trump capped another anarchic week by approving the US$1.3 trillion deal passed by the Republicancontrolled 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,” he 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, where he said: “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 shortlived Line Item Veto Act in 1996, giving then president Bill Clinton the power to scratch items from spending bills as a means to rein in fiscal excesses. — AFP