The Constitution

The United States Constitution allows the President ten days to either sign a bill approved by Congress, or “return it, with his Objections.” The later has come to be known as the presidential veto power.

In the first 40 years of the republic the presidential veto was used only 10 times, and 7 of those were by Madison. Thomas Jefferson and the two Adamses vetoed no Congressional legislation.

The Constitution does not provide the grounds upon which a president may veto a bill, but originally it was generally understood that a bill should be vetoed only if the President believed it to be unconstitutional. Andrew Jackson was the first president to use the veto power to reject bills on policy grounds, rather than for constitutional reasons.

The first use of the presidential veto power came in April 1792. The issue involved the Constitution’s “apportionment clause.”

As originally enacted, the Constitution provided that the number of representatives in the House were not to exceed one per every 30,000 enumerated persons in each state (being the total number of all free persons, less “Indians not taxed”, and plus 3/5 of all “other persons,” i.e., slaves). In the first Congress, there were 65 House members.

In 1792, Congress passed an Apportionment Act, increasing the number of representatives to 120, based on the 1790 census. The controversy that followed involved how to determine the number of representatives allowed to each state, and specifically how remainders were to be treated when doing the calculations. Skipping over the math issue itself, which although interesting is difficult to summarize, under the method employed in the bill (endorsed by Alexander Hamilton and called the “Hamilton Method”), the Northern states ended up with 8 more representatives that they would receive under the alternative method (endorsed by Thomas Jefferson and known as “the Jefferson Method”). Jefferson and his allies were able to persuade George Washington that under the Hamilton Method some states were being allotted more than one representative per every 30,000 persons, making the bill unconstitutional. Accordingly, Washington returned the bill to Congress with his objections—the first presidential veto. After Congress amended the bill (allowing one representative for every 33,00 persons), President Washington signed it into law.

There have been 2,585 presidential vetoes in U.S. history. The first one occurred on April 5, 1792, two hundred thirty-one years ago today.

Franklin D. Roosevelt vetoed more bills than any other president (635). Runner-up Grover Cleveland had 584. President Truman used the veto 250 times. Eisenhower vetoed 181 bills. No other president has used it more than 100 times. In recent history, presidential vetoes have been relatively infrequent. Presidents G.W. Bush, Obama, and Trump used the veto 12, 12, and 10 times, respectively. So far President Biden has used it once.

As the population of the country grew, and as new states were added, the number of representatives also grew. In 1911 the number of representatives was capped at 435, where it remains today, although the country's population has more than tripled since that time. Whereas at the time the Constitution was adopted it was anticipated that each member of the House would have about 30,000 constituents, today the average congressional district has a population of over 700,000.

The portrait of Washington is by Gilbert Stuart.