Five vetoes Congress overrode and what each showed about presidential power

The most powerful word in American government has two letters, and the President gets to say it. "No." A President who does not like a bill can send it back with a message, and it takes a two-thirds vote of both chambers to put it into law over his objection. That is a steep hill. It is steeper than most people realize. Do the arithmetic: two-thirds of a full House of 435 is exactly 290 votes, and two-thirds of a full Senate of 100 is 66.67, which means 67 in practice. A President needs only one-third plus one of either chamber to make a veto stick.

So when Congress climbs the hill, the event is rare and revealing. It tells you where the President's power ended and where the legislature's began. I want to look at five times it happened to Republican presidents, because Republicans like to talk about presidential strength when a Republican holds the office, and the record has a lesson about the limits of that strength that every conservative ought to know. These are not stories about villains. In several of them the President had a respectable argument. They are stories about the design of the Constitution, and the design works the way Madison hoped it would.

The rule in Article I

The veto lives in Article I, Section 7, which is about how a bill becomes law, not in Article II, which is about the President. That placement is a clue. The framers regarded the veto as part of the lawmaking process, a check by one branch on another, not an executive command. The President has ten days, Sundays excepted, to sign a bill or return it with his objections. If Congress adjourns and prevents the return, the bill dies without a signature, which is the "pocket veto." If he returns it, each chamber reconsiders, and if two-thirds of each agree, the bill becomes law.

Alexander Hamilton defended this arrangement in Federalist No. 73 as a "qualified negative": a power strong enough to protect the executive from being overrun and to discourage careless laws, but not so strong that one man could rule alone. A conservative who believes in limited government has reason to like both halves of that formula. A veto can stop a bad spending bill. An override ensures that no President is a king.

Now to the five cases. Here they are in a table, and then one at a time.

1. Nixon and the War Powers Resolution (1973)

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war in Article I, Section 8, and makes the President commander in chief in Article II. The Vietnam War had been fought for years without a declaration, resting on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964, and by 1973 Congress was determined to draw a line. The War Powers Resolution said that a President who sends forces into hostilities must report to Congress within 48 hours, and that the forces must come home within 60 days (with a 30-day extension for withdrawal) unless Congress authorizes the action.

Nixon vetoed it on October 24, 1973. His message argued that the resolution was unconstitutional, that it would take away powers the Constitution gave the President, and that it could damage the nation's ability to respond in a crisis. That argument has defenders to this day, including some who are no friends of Nixon. But look at the timing. Four days earlier, on October 20, Nixon had ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor, and the Attorney General and his deputy had resigned rather than carry out the order. The press called it the Saturday Night Massacre. A President who had spent the week dismantling confidence in his own office did not have the political capital to hold a veto. Both chambers overrode him on November 7, 1973.

What it showed: Congress is at its strongest against a President when the President is at his weakest, and no statute can settle a question the Constitution leaves open. Presidents of both parties have said, from Nixon on, that the resolution infringes on their powers, and they have kept its reporting requirement while contesting its clock. (One piece of the original law, the provision letting Congress end a deployment by concurrent resolution without the President's signature, rests on a device the Supreme Court struck down in a different context in INS v. Chadha in 1983.) The long argument is explained in The War Powers Resolution Explained, and Why Presidents Resist It and Who Decides on War? The Constitution, the 1973 Law and the Gray Zone.

2. Ford and the Freedom of Information Act (1974)

The Freedom of Information Act became law in 1966, and in 1974 Congress amended it to put real teeth in it: stricter deadlines for agencies to respond, limits on fees, and a power for courts to review in private whether information was properly classified. Gerald Ford, new in office after Nixon's resignation, vetoed the amendments on October 17, 1974. He did not oppose openness as such. His objection was the judicial review of classification decisions: he worried that a judge, without the expertise of the military and intelligence agencies, would be second-guessing decisions about secret information, and that the administrative burden on agencies would be heavy.

Congress overrode him in November 1974, one chamber on the 20th and the other on the 21st, only weeks after the Watergate scandal had made the executive branch's secrecy a national story.

What it showed: Congress can force the executive to open its files. And this is where conservatives should pay attention. A citizen with a Freedom of Information request is one of the few tools an ordinary person has to examine what a federal agency is doing with his money. The same law that Ford feared has been used by conservative watchdogs for decades to pry records out of Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Ford's national security concern was serious, and Congress's final law preserved the exemptions for classified material. The sound conservative position is to defend both: keep real secrets secret and make everything else public.

3. Reagan and the Clean Water Act (1987)

In 1972, Congress passed a major overhaul of the nation's water pollution law over a veto by Richard Nixon, who objected to its cost. Congress overrode him on October 18, 1972, the day after the veto. (A good fact to remember when someone tells you the environmental movement was only a Democratic cause.) By 1987 the law needed to be renewed and reshaped, and Congress sent President Reagan the Water Quality Act of 1987.

Reagan vetoed it on January 30, 1987. His objection was primarily about money: the bill authorized billions of dollars in spending, much of it for federal grants to build sewage treatment plants, and he judged it too expensive and too tied to Washington. Congress overrode him on February 4, 1987, five days later.

Here is the part of this story that most people skip. The bill that passed was not the bill Reagan vetoed in spirit. The new law moved the country away from permanent federal construction grants and toward state revolving loan funds, in which federal money seeds a state fund that makes loans and gets repaid. Loans instead of grants was a conservative idea. The President's pressure shaped the law even though he lost the vote.

What it showed: even a defeated veto changes the product, and a popular program, in an era when voters care about clean rivers, is hard to stop on cost alone. It also showed the federalism point that our piece Three Towns, Three Rule Books and the Case for Letting States Differ describes: who pays decides who rules.

4. Reagan and the Civil Rights Restoration Act (1988)

In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), the Supreme Court held that when a college received federal student aid, the civil rights law covering sex discrimination in education applied only to the particular program receiving the money, not the whole institution. Civil rights groups and many in Congress thought that reading was too narrow. The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 said, in effect, that the Court had misread what Congress meant: if an institution takes federal money, the anti-discrimination rule covers the entire institution.

Reagan vetoed the bill on March 16, 1988. His objection was not to the principle of equal treatment. It was that the bill expanded federal control over private institutions, including churches and religious organizations, and gave too little protection to their religious beliefs. He asked Congress to add amendments to protect them, and Congress did not adopt the changes he wanted. The House and Senate overrode him on March 22, 1988, and large numbers of Republicans in both chambers voted to override.

What it showed: Congress has the last word on what its own statutes mean. If the Supreme Court reads a law more narrowly than Congress intended, Congress can amend the law to say what it meant. That is a different thing from the Court striking down a law as unconstitutional, which only a constitutional amendment can reverse. Conservatives who complain that judges "make law" should keep this tool in view: the answer to a bad statutory reading is a better statute. There is also a lesson for religious liberty advocates: a fight over exemptions that is lost in the legislature is a fight that needs to be won earlier, at the drafting stage, when the votes are being counted.

5. The defense bill of December 2020

The National Defense Authorization Act is one of the few bills that Congress has passed every year for generations, and it covers military pay, weapons programs and policy. For fiscal year 2021, the bill passed both chambers by margins well above the two-thirds mark, under a Republican-led Senate. President Trump vetoed it on December 23, 2020, and gave several reasons. The two best known were that he objected to the absence of a repeal of Section 230, the law that protects online platforms from liability for what users post, and that he objected to provisions for renaming military bases that honored Confederate leaders.

The House overrode the veto on December 28, 2020, and the Senate followed on January 1, 2021. It was the only veto override of his first term.

What it showed: a veto is weak leverage when the bill is something the country has to pass. Soldiers' pay and the weapons budget do not wait for a political fight over an unrelated subject. A President who vetoes a defense bill over a technology law is asking Congress to carry two different arguments in one vehicle, and Congress said no. Whatever you think of Section 230, and our pieces Section 230 Explained in Plain English, Down to the Twenty-Six Words and Four Ways to Reform Section 230 and What Each Would Do to Real Websites set out the options, a separate bill is the cleaner route. Notice also that a Republican-controlled Senate overrode a Republican President. The branches check each other, not the parties.

What the five have in common

Line the cases up and you see a pattern.

1. The overrides came when the President was weak or the bill was strong. Nixon in 1973 was fighting for survival. Ford in 1974 was new and the country was angry about secrecy. Reagan in 1987 and 1988 faced bills that both parties' members wanted. Trump in 2020 vetoed a bill that must pass.
2. The President usually had a real argument. Nixon on the commander in chief, Ford on classified information, Reagan on cost and on religious liberty, Trump on an unrelated policy that he thought mattered. Overridden does not mean wrong.
3. Congress can reach even the courts. The Restoration Act corrected a Supreme Court decision by statute. That is the legislature doing its job. Our piece Congress Should Write the Laws, and Other Radical Ideas From Article I explains why the Constitution wants it that way.
4. Money and war are Congress's cards. Of the five, two touched the power of the purse and one touched the war power. The founders gave those to Congress on purpose. See also the piece on how presidents have tried to take control of spending, Nixon Impounded the Money, Congress Fought Back, and the 1974 Law Still Rules.

Here is the answer to the objection that I can hear coming: "Isn't an override just Congress being obstinate? Shouldn't conservatives want a strong executive?" It is a fair question. A strong executive is part of the constitutional design. But the strength Article II describes is the strength to enforce the laws and to command the military, not the strength to write the laws. A conservative who wants a powerful President when his party holds the office must expect the same powerful President when the other party holds it. The wise position is the Madisonian one, laid out in Madison's Plan for a Government That Fights Itself on Purpose: ambition must counteract ambition, and that includes the ambition of a President of your own party.

The bottom line

• A veto needs only one-third plus one in either chamber to stand. An override needs two-thirds of both: 290 votes in a full House of 435 and 67 in a full Senate of 100. When it happens, pay attention.
• Republican presidents lost five important fights this way: the War Powers Resolution (1973), the Freedom of Information Act amendments (1974), the Water Quality Act (1987), the Civil Rights Restoration Act (1988) and the 2021 defense bill (overridden in December 2020 and January 2021). In each case the President had a respectable argument and lost anyway.
• A defeated veto still shapes a bill. Reagan's pressure pushed the water law toward loans.
• If you do not like how a court read a statute, the answer is a new statute. If you do not like a President's overreach, the answer is Article I.
• Read the veto message when a veto is in the news. It is short, public, and tells you the real argument. Then ask your representative how they voted on the override.