This makes intuitive sense. Presidents have more leverage with Congress to shape legislation to their liking when their party controls one or both chambers, and congressional leaders usually try to avoid showdowns with presidents of their own party. Conversely, a Congress run by the opposition may deliberately seek out confrontation — sending bills to the White House that are sure to get vetoed so as to sharpen political contrasts with the president.
By their nature, pocket vetoes can’t be overridden, since Congress isn’t in place to act. And while Congress can try to override a regular presidential veto, it doesn’t often succeed: Only 31 of the 194 vetoes referred to above (16%) were overridden. Override attempts failed in 74 cases (38%), and in the remaining 89 cases (46%) Congress accepted the vetoes with no attempt to override. Put another way: If the President vetoes a bill it has a better than 8-in-10 chance of staying vetoed.
The chances of a successful override improve when one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the party in opposition to the president’s. According to our analysis, of the 29 regular vetoes issued when either the House or the Senate (but not both) was run by the opposition, six (20.7%) were overridden. Twenty-three of the 140 vetoes issued when both chambers were controlled by the opposition (16.4%) were overridden. By contrast, only two of the 25 vetoes issued during the dozen years when the same party controlled the House, Senate and the White House were overridden.
George W. Bush’s presidency may hold some clues to what lies ahead for Obama. Bush vetoed no bills in his first term and only one (which was sustained) in his second. (Democrats controlled the Senate for most of Bush’s first two years in office; otherwise the GOP dominated Capitol Hill.) In 2006, however, Democrats won control of both the House and Senate. During the subsequent 110th Congress Bush issued 11 vetoes, four of which were overridden.
To date, Obama has vetoed just two bills — both, as it happens, during the two years Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. The first, a stopgap budget resolution, was vetoed in December 2009 as “unnecessary” given the subsequent passage of a regular defense-spending bill. The other veto, in October 2010, was of a bill concerning the interstate recognition of notarizations by federal and state judges — which doesn’t sound like much, except that it came as several major banks were entangled in the “robo-signing” foreclosure scandal. In his disapproval memorandum, Obama said he was concerned about the measure’s “possible unintended impact…on consumer protections, including those for mortgages.” Both vetoes were sustained.