As Republican strategists put together their agenda for this year's midterm elections, one hopes that they include a promise to vote on a badly needed constitutional amendment. They should consider finally and irrevocably granting our president the power of line-item veto.

In 1996, Congress passed legislation giving President Bill Clinton the line-item veto, but it didn't last long. Mayor Rudy Giuliani brought suit over some New York City-targeted pork that Clinton had line-item vetoed out of a bill. The Supreme Court eventually sided with Giuliani and the national government reverted to the all-or-nothing veto that presidents hate to use.

In 2006, President George W. Bush proposed that Congress take another stab at it. Under his complex scheme, the president could kill several line items in a bill while still signing said bill, and then those line-items would go back to Congress for up-or-down, individual votes. Anti-pork crusaders, including Senator John McCain, loved that idea, but it went precisely nowhere - for two reasons.

One, most congressmen like to slip pet projects into larger bills that have to pass, and they don't want to have to defend those items individually. Two, there is a good chance that the Supreme Court would find even the modified line-item veto unconstitutional.

I'm not expert in such things but the justices might be right to do so. The line-item veto was not included in the president's enumerated constitutional powers and could alter the balance of powers between two branches of the federal government. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but if it's worth doing it should be done through the amendment process to render it beyond question.

Constitutional amendments usually take years to be ratified once they're approved by Congress. A line-item veto would be the exception. The lion's share of governors across the country have the power of line-item veto. It would be an example of the states, as laboratories of democracy, leading the way for the federal government to finally get with the program.

It would also be smart politics. Right now, the American people are worried about jobs and spending. They want more of the former and for government to do less of the latter. President Barack Obama has promised to end earmarks and proposed a spending freeze of some programs. But it seems halfhearted, especially when we see him simultaneously promoting so many new, large government programs.

He can get away with calling for a spending freeze and denouncing earmarks because of the way the legislative process works. Congress will pass what it wishes and the president has to either take it or leave it. Especially in times when one party controls both the legislature and the White House, the urge to take it is overwhelming. George W. Bush only once vetoed a bill sent to him by Republican Congresses.

Congressional Republicans have a real chance to shake things up now. They can prove they are serious about spending restraint by offering to grant the line-item veto to a Democratic president who could disproportionately target Republican pork projects.

During the campaign, Obama said that he didn't want to take a "hatchet" to spending but that he would like to use a "scalpel" and go through bills line-by-line, cutting out wasteful, unnecessary spending. It was a good line but really meaningless minus the line-item veto.

Obama has admitted that he's fallen short of his pledge to end earmarks but shrugged it off by saying he can't be expected to deliver on his oft-repeated campaign promise to "change the culture of Washington" overnight. But with a line-item veto, he could do exactly that.

Republicans should hand Obama that scalpel. We would see soon enough if our president was willing to use it.