Stronger Presidential Veto

Browsing through Clinton Rossiter's The Grand Convention, I was struck by how much of the Constitution seems to have been decided in the last couple of weeks.

In particular, until very late, the draft required a three-fourths majority to override a Presidential veto. It was reduced to two-thirds by a 6-4 vote with NH divided.

WI it had stayed at three-fourths? One immediate change is that the bar for removing an impeached POTUS is probably likewise raised, since iirc the two were seen as linked, and that it should not be possible to remove a POTUS in order to get round a veto that couldn't otherwise be overridden.

But where do we go from there? The first veto override, under Tyler, probably still happens, as that was by more than three fourths. But how many others would be sustained? And how important would they be?
 
Browsing through Clinton Rossiter's The Grand Convention, I was struck by how much of the Constitution seems to have been decided in the last couple of weeks.

In particular, until very late, the draft required a three-fourths majority to override a Presidential veto. It was reduced to two-thirds by a 6-4 vote with NH divided.

WI it had stayed at three-fourths? One immediate change is that the bar for removing an impeached POTUS is probably likewise raised, since iirc the two were seen as linked, and that it should not be possible to remove a POTUS in order to get round a veto that couldn't otherwise be overridden.

But where do we go from there? The first veto override, under Tyler, probably still happens, as that was by more than three fourths. But how many others would be sustained? And how important would they be?

The first successful override of a veto of a major piece of legislation AFAIK was of Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Senate vote was 33-15, so the override would not be successful under the three-fourths standard. http://books.google.com/books?id=90wHAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA143 But if constitutional amendments still took only a two-thirds vote of each House (and ratification by three-fourths of the states) the basic provisions of the law would be enacted into the Constitution through the Fourteenth Amendment anyway--there is no veto of constitutional amendments.

Also, Truman's Taft-Hartley veto is sustained.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0623.html

(All this is ignoring butterfly effects, of course.)
 
Top