Sports and politics are both noted for some famous streaks.  Cal Ripken’s consecutive games streak, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, even Alexander Karelin’s Greco-Roman wrestling winning streak. In politics, the late Sen. William Proxmire didn’t miss a single recorded vote for 20 years. Now comes word from the White House that another active streak—President Bush’s veto-less streak—may come to an end in the coming weeks. Although this isn’t a record-breaking streak—Thomas Jefferson went his entire Presidency without vetoing any legislation—we won’t be sad to see the current veto-less streak come to and end.  In fact, it is long past time.

It is a perfect storm of events that could lead to this administration’s first veto. The President asked for a $92 billion emergency spending bill, and while the House passed a bill just below that amount, the Senate’s bill is $17 billion over the original request, weighing in at more than $109 billion. Making matters worse, many of the items added to the Senate bill are totally unrelated to Katrina or the war in Iraq. This administration is in dire need to appear principled on issues of fiscal responsibility. These two factors together make the veto pen a mighty tool for the president to help turn around some of his recent political misfortunes. Vetoing this porker of a bill would seem to be a no-brainer, but we have certainly been fooled before.

This president’s failure to veto even one bill speaks volumes about the run-away spending that is profligate on Capitol Hill. Newly-installed Chief of Staff Josh Bolton responds this way. “The question is … why not veto bills? And the difficulty is that these are massive bills typically, many of them in the tens of billions of dollars, and the individual earmark problems are a miniscule portion. I mean, earmarks are a serious problem, but they are not a major portion of the budget in most cases. …And to then step in and veto a bill over half of one percent of spending in that bill creates more disruption and probably in the aggregate isn't wise.” Isn’t wise for whom? Congress? The Republican Party? It would certainly be wise from the perspective of the American taxpayers, who are currently drowning in red ink.

For the last five years, the President has been fairly effective at sounding the alarm on federal spending, but when the time comes to get tough on Congressional porkers, he chickens out. In 2002, the President said that, “so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible way,” deficit spending would be limited. Later that year, he signed the bloated farm bill. In 2003 he said, “the best way to address the deficit and move toward a balanced budget is to…show some spending discipline in Washington, D.C.,” and in 2004 said the way to get there was “by acting as good stewards of taxpayer dollars.” Despite this tough rhetoric, he signed the budget-busting Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, the giveaway-rich corporate tax bill in 2004, and the pork-stuffed transportation bill in 2005.  We only hope this trend doesn’t continue in 2006.

We know that vetoing the supplemental won’t be politically pain-free, but the President needs to seize the opportunity to draw a deep line in the spending sand.  It would show voters that the administration is serious about standing up to the big spenders, and vetoing an overstuffed supplemental spending bill could be the start of a new streak – a streak of fiscal responsibility in Washington.