Ship of Fools: Mnuchin, Santorum Aboard
This post was originally only about Treasury Secretary Steve Munchkin on a Sunday morning news show. Then former Republican Senator Rick Santorum spoke up, just begging for recognition.
Mnuchin pitches line-item veto: ‘Congress could pass a rule’
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has urged lawmakers to give President Trump a line-item veto, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that it might prevent Democrats from stacking more nondefense discretionary spending into the next must-past budget bill.
But Mnuchin’s short exchange with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace also underlined the problem with the idea — a 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling that struck down the line-item veto, finding “no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend or to repeal statutes,” after President Bill Clinton used it 82 times.
“I think they should give the president a line-item veto,” said Mnuchin, echoing Trump’s comments after he signed last week’s omnibus budget bill.
“That’s been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,” Wallace said.
“Well, again, Congress could pass a rule, okay, that allows them to do it,” Mnuchin said.
“It would be a constitutional amendment,” Wallace said.
“Chris, we don’t need to get into a debate,” the treasury secretary said. “There’s different ways of doing this.”
Rick Santorum: Students Should Learn CPR, Not Seek Gun Laws
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Sunday that students who have rallied for gun control should instead learn CPR or find their own way to prevent a school shooting.
“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” the Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate said students could work to stop bullying in their communities or respond themselves to a shooter instead of asking lawmakers to approve legislation to protect them.
Santorum’s comments prompted outrage on social media a day after hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their supporters rallied across the U.S. to push for tougher laws to fight gun violence.
The demonstrations Saturday were led by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed last month.
Santorum said that if the rallies are about more than politics, then the country needs to have a broader discussion that doesn’t revolve around “phony gun laws” that don’t work.
“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” he said of the demonstrators. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?
Bob Schwartz 