United States
A pocket veto is a presidential veto, but of a particular type. The U.S. Constitution limits the President's period for decision on whether to sign or veto any legislation to ten days (not including Sundays) while the United States Congress is in session. The Constitution provides for two types of vetoes: a regular or return veto, when the president sends a bill, along with his objections, back to the house of Congress in which the bill originated. Congress can override the veto by 2/3 vote of both houses, whereupon the bill becomes law. A pocket veto only comes into play when Congress by its adjournment prevents return of the bill. Thus, a pocket veto can only occur under two circumstances: a) if Congress is adjourned, and b) if bill return to Congress is not possible (bill return is possible when Congress has adjourned, but has designated an agent to receive veto messages and other communications, an action Congresses have taken routinely for decades). If, under these circumstances, the president withholds his signature, the bill dies instead of becoming law. That is the pocket veto. (If the president neither signs nor vetoes a bill when Congress is in session, the bill becomes law without his signature after 10 days.) Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution states:
If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a Law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a Law.
Since Congress cannot vote while in adjournment, a pocket veto cannot be overridden (but see below). James Madison became the first president to use the pocket veto in 1812.
Read more about this topic: Pocket Veto
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—’indoctrination’ we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can’t make that kind of use of the office.... I can’t do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)