President Barack Obama's Jan. 25 State of the Union address wasn't just a chance for him to update Congress on the country's economic recovery and make salmon jokes. He also used it as an opportunity to make a veto threat.
"If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it," he said.
So far, his threat seems to have worked — a two-year moratorium on earmarks has already been introduced in the Senate.
Donna Hoffman, associate professor of political science at the University of Northern Iowa and an expert on State of the Union addresses, says more specific veto threats are more likely to be effective.
Specificity also indicates also indicates how willing the president delivering the threat is to follow through with it. A president making a veto threat is attempting to shape the part of legislative process he has the least involvement in.
"Some of the ones that you see in recent history are very vague," Hoffman said. "President Obama's was very specific, so he's very credible."
While veto threats are an infrequent State of the Union element, Obama isn't the first to make one, and probably won't be the last.
Gerald Ford was the first president to make a veto threat during his 1975 State of the Union address. He vowed to veto "any new spending programs adopted by the Congress" — another specific threat. Since then, four presidents, including Obama, have delivered similar threats, primarily about budget issues.
* In 1987, Ronald Reagan vowed to veto any law that would put the U.S. in a negotiating position with the Soviet Union, and in 1988 he promised to strike down "any attempt to bust our budget agreement."
* In 1994, Bill Clinton said he would send back any health care legislation that didn't guarantee universal insurance.
* George W. Bush made two threats — one in favor of Medicare prescription drug coverage in 2004, and another demanding that Congress cut earmarks in half in 2008.
In addition to this year's earmarks threat, in 2010 Obama threatened to strike down any discretionary spending programs he deemed unnecessary.
Even though it may seem Ford started a trend, Hoffman said she doesn't think he set a precedent.
As politics has become more divisive and Congress more divided, particularly since the second half of the 20th century, veto threats have become more common.
"Most instances are going to be where you have a divided government," Hoffman said. "They want this to resonate with the public. You're going to need to do that when one of the chambers is controlled by the other party."
Before Ford, there was rarely any mention of the veto in State of the Union addresses.
A few presidents during the country's first century expressed their dislike for or hesitation to use their veto power. In his 1857 message to Congress (during a long period in which presidents sent written messages, rather than deliver an oral address), James Buchanan referred to vetoing bills as a way of "stopping the wheels of government."
Zachary Taylor had also expressed this sentiment, writing in 1849 that the veto was "an extreme measure, to be resorted to only in extraordinary cases."
But no early president lectured Congress on the purpose of the veto like James Polk, who in 1848 devoted a large part of his annual message to a lengthy explanation of the veto's role in the legislative process. His tone was similar to a middle school civics teacher giving a class their first lesson on checks and balances.
According to Hoffman, the reason for these veto discussions is that the presidency played a very different role in American politics in the country's early years. Until Woodrow Wilson reinstated the tradition of an oral State of the Union address, the president's legislative role was minimal. A public and oral State of the Union address brought the opportunity for veto threats.
"You don't find a lot of veto threats because the speech is very public," Hoffman said. "If a president's going to use a veto threat during the State of the Union it's obviously very much in the public domain if he didn't carry through."
Kaitlin Kovach writes for CQ.
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