MB Civic

By SHERYL STOLBERG
WASHINGTON

OF all the powers of the presidency, the veto is among the most potent.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected or failed to sign 635 bills during his 12 years in office, using his veto power to keep Congress — run by his fellow Democrats — subservient. Harry S. Truman vetoed 250 bills; Dwight D. Eisenhower, 181. Bill Clinton used one of 37 vetoes to reject a law banning a particular type of abortion.

But until last week, when President Bush vetoed a bill to expand federally supported embryonic stem cell research, the incumbent president — a man who has taken an especially aggressive approach to expanding executive authority — left the veto power untouched.

Conventional wisdom holds that Mr. Bush went more than five years without exercising his veto power simply because he did not have to: the Republicans who control Congress gave him everything he wanted.

That is, for the most part, true. But Mr. Bush has also found ways of exercising control over (or circumventing) Congress without using the veto. When Mr. Bush wanted to empower federal authorities to monitor the international communications of suspected terrorists, he did so by issuing a secret executive order, avoiding a possible legislative battle — and the potential veto that might go along with it.

And when Congress last year passed a legislative amendment barring cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees in American custody, Mr. Bush — who had threatened a veto but ultimately backed down — tacked a “signing statement” onto the measure, asserting that he could interpret the amendment as he deemed fit with his constitutional authority as commander in chief.

“President Bush has vetoed things without vetoing them,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Boston University. “He’s kind of found alternative ways in which he can basically say no to Congress without publicly saying no, or publicly having the confrontation.”

That is not to say there have been no confrontations. The threat of a veto can be just as powerful as a veto itself, and the Bush administration says it has issued 141 such threats since taking office. Some involved disputes over federal spending, an area where Mr. Bush has used veto threats to force compromise with fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Yet some in the party, irate over the federal deficit, say they wish Mr. Bush had exercised his veto power sooner.

In 2002, the president came close to vetoing a $190 billion farm bill that expanded subsidies for growers.

“I think he should have vetoed the farm bill, because it was a lousy bill that perpetuated a really bad system,” said Nicholas E. Calio, who was then Mr. Bush’s assistant for legislative affairs. “But some people convinced him that discretion was the better part of valor.”

The veto — Latin for “I forbid” — was not always such an expansive tool of presidential power. Early presidents used it sparingly, only when they believed Congress had violated the Constitution.

George Washington issued two vetoes; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, none. When James Monroe exercised his first and only veto, rejecting a bill imposing tolls on the Cumberland Road because he believed a constitutional amendment was required, he issued a 25,000-word explanation along with it.

That narrow philosophy of the role of the veto changed with Andrew Jackson. Jackson famously exercised his veto to reject the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, turning the veto from a constitutional message into a political one.

“Rather than just arguing that the bank is unconstitutional, Jackson is arguing that the bank is wrong,” said Brian Balogh, a historian at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. “This is a real change in the assertion of presidential power.”

If the veto is a political message, a president’s first veto is always subject to close scrutiny, and that was certainly the case last week with Mr. Bush. With polls showing the vast majority of Americans in favor of embryonic stem cell research, and Republicans deeply divided on the issue, the president has faced intense criticism, including from some in his own party.

As Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who contends that the veto will hurt Republican candidates, said, “It would not be anywhere near as big a deal if he had ever vetoed anything else.”

That is why Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, advises presidents not to follow Mr. Bush’s veto path.

“I tell every president or adviser, take one of the first 10 bills that come to you, pick it at random and veto it,” Mr. Ornstein said. “You want to get it out of the way, otherwise the first veto takes on an enhanced importance, and you’ve got to explain and justify why this one and not all the others.”