THE WEEK

□ After a coup in Uganda toppled Milton Obote, Idi Amin sent word that he was available to help restore order, should his country call. Meanwhile, in Haiti, Baby Doc Duvalier won re-election—for life—with a comfy 99.99 per cent of the vote. Now back to South Africa.

□ If conservatives have had any doubts about the line-item veto, those doubts have been constitutional. Would it expand presidential power? Erode Congress’s power of the purse? No need to worry any more. Ted Kennedy, that pillar of strict-constructionist virtue and paradigm of congressional parsimony, says it’s OK. Seriously—in a recent Op-Ed piece, Senator Kennedy, who favors the line-item veto, voiced the decisive argument: The regular old veto worked perfectly well for years because for years no one, including by implication the Founders, contemplated a Federal Government spending a trillion dollars a year and doing it through a handful of arbitrarily stitched-together appropriations bills that together affect every aspect of American life. The line-item veto, we would add, would restore a presidential power that has been eviscerated by congressional extravagance that itself violates the spirit and in many ways the letter of the Constitution.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

National Review

□ After a coup in Uganda toppled Milton Obote, Idi Amin sent word that he was available to help restore order, should his country call. Meanwhile, in Haiti, Baby Doc Duvalier won re-election—for life—with a comfy 99.99 per cent of the vote. Now back to South Africa.

□ If conservatives have had any doubts about the line-item veto, those doubts have been constitutional. Would it expand presidential power? Erode Congress’s power of the purse? No need to worry any more. Ted Kennedy, that pillar of strict-constructionist virtue and paradigm of congressional parsimony, says it’s OK. Seriously—in a recent Op-Ed piece, Senator Kennedy, who favors the line-item veto, voiced the decisive argument: The regular old veto worked perfectly well for years because for years no one, including by implication the Founders, contemplated a Federal Government spending a trillion dollars a year and doing it through a handful of arbitrarily stitched-together appropriations bills that together affect every aspect of American life. The line-item veto, we would add, would restore a presidential power that has been eviscerated by congressional extravagance that itself violates the spirit and in many ways the letter of the Constitution.