CHARLES BIERBAUER, CNN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: What I always remember is Ronald Reagan saying, give me what the governors of 43 states had and I had when I was in California, is that line item veto, the ability to literally line out an element, in this case in a budget bill, that you don't like, I don't want to spend a billion dollars for this, that, or the other thing, so I can line it out and Congress may override it, but we're not vetoing the entire budget.</s>WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think it should be used with great care and discipline.</s>BIERBAUER: Well, Congress gave this authority to the president. It didn't happen in Ronald Reagan's term, it didn't happen in George Bush's term. Ironically, the Republicans wanted it, they gave it to a Democratic president. Bill Clinton got that authority, he signed the bill and then used the line item veto a number of times.</s>CLINTON: The great value of it was it was a -- it was just another part of the framework of fiscal discipline we're trying to enlist.</s>BIERBAUER: But ultimately it was challenged and it was overturned by the Supreme Court, which said that this was an unconstitutional grant of power by Congress to the president, that Congress had no authority to give the president the ability to line out items in a budget bill, that the only authority the president was granted by the Constitution was the ability to veto a bill in its entirety.
CNN 20: Clinton Signs Line Item Veto, April 9, 1996