Old enough to remember Congress and courts dancing on the head of a pin over a presidental line item veto

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The Constitution gave Congress the power of the purse, denying the President unilateral power to spend money that Congress has provided.

Courts, including the Supreme Court, have protected this congressional power, and repeatedly rejected presidential attempts to spend less than Congress appropriated.

Indeed, the Supreme Court’s 1998 decision overturning the Line-Item Veto Act reinforced the Constitution's precepts that presidents have no inherent constitutional authority to impound funds.

Wiki:

Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 6–3, that the line-item veto, as granted in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution because it impermissibly gave the President of the United States the power to unilaterally amend or repeal parts of statutes that had been duly passed by the United States Congress.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the six-justice majority that the line-item veto gave the President power over legislation unintended by the Constitution, and was therefore an overstep in their duties.

At its passage, the LIV Act was politically controversial, with many Democrats breaking with Clinton to oppose it. Of the opposition, six members of Congress, including Republican Mark Hatfield, sued to prevent use of the line-item veto. They were granted summary judgment by the U.S. District Court, but the Supreme Court held that the Congressmen lacked standing because they could not show any particularized harm, and dismissed their suit in Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997).

Within the next two months, Clinton began using the line-item veto, prompting several entities to file suit in a second attempt to have the Act declared unconstitutional.

In the second case, which was consolidated from two cases by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the City of New York and several organizations related to health care alleged injury from President Bill Clinton's cancellation of certain provisions of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that eliminated certain liabilities, and Snake River Potato Growers, Inc. alleged injury from the President's cancellation of certain provisions of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 that gave tax benefits to aid farmer's cooperatives in purchasing potato processing facilities.

In a majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court ruled that because the Act allowed the President to unilaterally amend or repeal parts of duly enacted statutes by using line-item cancellations, it violated the Presentment Clause of the Constitution, which outlines a specific practice for enacting a statute. The Court construed the silence of the Constitution on the subject of such unilateral Presidential action as equivalent to "an express prohibition", agreeing with historical material that supported the conclusion that statutes may only be enacted "in accord with a single, finely wrought and exhaustively considered, procedure", and that a bill must be approved or rejected by the President in its entirety.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in an opinion concurring in the opinion and judgment of the Court, objected to the dissent's argument that the Act did not violate principles of the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty, stating that the "undeniable effects" of the Act were to "enhance the President's power to reward one group and punish another, to help one set of taxpayers and hurt another, to favor one State and ignore another". Kennedy's concurrence implicitly viewed the statute as a violation of the nondelegation doctrine.

In an alternative opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia objected to the Court's consideration of the case with respect to the Taxpayer Relief Act, finding no party in the case with standing to challenge it. However, he did find a party with standing to challenge the President's cancellation in the Balanced Budget Act, and concluded that it did not violate the Constitution, because the Congress has the power to delegate the discretionary authority to decline to spend appropriated sums of money, which he asserted was equivalent to cancellation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._City_of_New_York

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