What Is a Pocket Veto? The Presidential Power That Can't Be Overridden

The Congressional Research Service defines the pocket veto this way: "Pocket vetoes occur when the President receives a bill but is unable to reject and return the bill to an adjourned Congress within the 10-day period. The bill, though lacking a signature and formal objections, does not become law." A regular veto goes back to Congress and can be overridden by a two-thirds vote in each chamber. A pocket veto does not, and CRS records that pocket vetoes "are not subject to the congressional veto override process." That is the doctrine. Which adjournments actually produce one has been contested since 1929 and, as this page explains below, is still disputed.

The Constitutional Basis

Article I, Section 7 specifies: "If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law." That final clause is the pocket veto provision. CRS reads it as drawing the distinction between "regular vetoes" (returned to Congress for an override vote) and "pocket vetoes" (not returned).

The only way around a pocket veto is to start over. In CRS's words, "the only way for Congress to circumvent the pocket veto is to reintroduce the legislation as a new bill, pass it through both chambers, and present it to the President again for signature."

When a Pocket Veto Can Occur

A pocket veto is possible only when Congress has adjourned within the 10-day window that begins when the bill is presented to the President. If Congress is in session throughout, the President must sign the bill, return it with objections, or let it become law without a signature.

The Office of Legal Counsel described the mechanism to a Member of the House in 1990, and its framing is worth keeping in mind: a pocket veto "is not a power of the President that he exercises affirmatively. Rather, pocket vetoes happen automatically on the tenth day after presentment if the President has not signed the bill." It operates "only if the tenth day after presentment falls during an adjournment" — which, OLC noted, makes the scheduling of presentment a lever in Congress's own hands.

The "Adjournment" Question

Everything turns on which adjournments count, and three cases mark the boundaries.

1929 — The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655. A bill reached President Coolidge on June 24, 1926, fewer than 10 days before Congress adjourned on July 3 at the end of the first session of the 69th Congress; the intersession adjournment ran until December 6, "or over five months." The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the pocket veto. But it did not hold that intersession adjournments as such trigger the power. In the Court's own words, "the determinative question in reference to an 'adjournment' is not whether it is a final adjournment of Congress or an interim adjournment, such as an adjournment of the first session, but whether it is one that 'prevents' the President from returning the bill to the House in which it originated within the time allowed." The Court also said delivery to a legislative agent would not suffice — but CRS records that the point about legislative agents "was dicta and not the central holding of the case" — a reading William H. Rehnquist endorsed in 1971 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

1938 — Wright v. United States, 302 U.S. 583. Here the Senate alone recessed, for three days, and the President returned the bill to the Secretary of the Senate. The Court held the return good, and it began from the text: "'The Congress' did not adjourn. The Senate alone was in recess. The Constitution creates and defines 'the Congress.' It consists 'of a Senate and House of Representatives.' Article 1, § 1. The Senate is not 'the Congress.'" On the mechanics of return it added that the Constitution "does not define what shall constitute a return of a bill or deny the use of appropriate agencies in effecting the return", and asked of a bill returned by messenger: "why may it not be received by the accredited agent of the legislative body?" Its holding was stated narrowly and with its conditions attached: "We hold that where the Congress has not adjourned and the House in which the bill originated is in recess for not more than three days under the constitutional permission while Congress is in session, the bill does not become a law if the President has delivered the bill with his objections to the appropriate officer of the House within the prescribed ten days, and the Congress does not pass the bill over his objections by the requisite votes." The Court expressly declined to read the 1929 case as controlling: "We do not regard that decision as applicable for two reasons: (1) The present question was not involved; and (2) the reasoning of the decision is inapposite to the circumstances of this case."

1974 — Kennedy v. Sampson, 511 F.2d 430 (D.C. Cir.). President Nixon pocket vetoed the Family Practice of Medicine Bill over the 1970 Christmas break, when the Senate was away four days and the House five. The D.C. Circuit ruled that an intrasession adjournment of Congress "does not prevent the President from returning a bill which he disapproves so long as appropriate arrangements are made for the receipt of presidential vetoes during the adjournment." The Justice Department did not appeal, and the bill was printed as a public law backdated to December 25, 1970.

Those three cases do not conflict with one another — they answer different questions. The real division came later. On November 30, 1983, President Reagan pocket vetoed a bill "to require certification of human rights practices in El Salvador as a precondition for sending military aid", during an intersession adjournment that ran nine weeks. A district court upheld him, following the 1929 case. The D.C. Circuit reversed in Barnes v. Kline, 759 F.2d 21 (1985), on the ground that both chambers had arranged in advance for an agent to receive veto messages: "It is difficult to understand how Congress could be said to have prevented return of H.R. 4042 simply by adjourning. Rather, by appointing agents for receipt of veto messages, Congress affirmatively facilitated return of the bill in the eventuality that the President would disapprove it." In 1987 the Supreme Court took the case — Burke v. Barnes, 479 U.S. 361 — and held it moot, because the bill had expired by its own terms. CRS puts the consequence plainly: "judicial interpretations of the pocket veto power remain unclear because the Supreme Court in 1987 decided to sidestep a pocket veto issue on procedural grounds (mootness) rather than reach a substantive holding."

Where That Leaves It

For a period the boundary was set by agreement rather than by a court. CRS describes an arrangement reached under Presidents Ford and Carter "limiting the pocket veto to the end of the second session of a Congress, after Congress had adjourned sine die, provided that Congress has instructed legislative agents to receive presidential messages." Every one of Carter's 18 pocket vetoes was exercised after a sine die adjournment.

That accommodation broke down. As of the March 2001 edition of the CRS report on the subject, it "has been disrupted in the past three administrations of Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, who invoked the pocket veto between the first and second sessions and at times in the middle of a session." What emerged instead, in that same 2001 account, was a hybrid the Justice Department called a "protective return": in CRS's definition, "the President claims the power of pocket veto but, at the same time, returns the bill to Congress for a possible override."

So the honest answer to whether a pocket veto can be overridden has two halves. The classic pocket veto cannot be — there is nothing before Congress to vote on. But CRS's conclusion in 2001, about the practice as it then stood, is that the status of those claimed pocket vetoes "remains unclear because Presidents claim the pocket veto power while at the same time they return the bill to Congress for a possible override. In a number of cases, Congress has taken votes in an effort to override these vetoes." At least once, both chambers actually voted the override through. In 1974 Congress adjourned from October 17 to November 18 for the elections; President Ford claimed five pocket vetoes during that period but returned the bills to Congress anyway, and CRS records that "Congress treated the 'pocket vetoes' as return vetoes, capable of being overridden by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. In fact, both Houses overrode the veto of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments: the House on November 20 and the Senate on November 21. Nevertheless, the Administration refused to promulgate it as a law." Congress has also repeatedly considered legislation defining "adjournment"; CRS's assessment in that same 2001 report was that those efforts "have thus far been unsuccessful."

How Frequent Are Pocket Vetoes?

Pocket vetoes are the minority of vetoes and the majority of presidents have used one. The Senate's summary table records 1,066 pocket vetoes against 1,533 regular vetoes since 1789, and 32 of its 47 presidencies have a non-zero pocket-veto figure. Franklin Roosevelt used the power more than any other president, with 263; the next highest is Grover Cleveland's second term, at 128.

The tables show the practice all but stopping. Reagan recorded 39 pocket vetoes and George H. W. Bush 15; Clinton recorded 1, and George W. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden each recorded none. Those zeros count vetoes as Congress disposed of them, not claims a President made — and on that the sources agree rather than diverge.

Where a claimed pocket veto was returned to Congress and treated as an ordinary veto, it is counted as a regular one. CRS says it "considers instances where Congress has treated a disputed pocket veto like a regular veto to be a regular veto and includes them in the counts provided." The American Presidency Project gives the worked case: George W. Bush "characterized his veto of H.R. 1585 in the 110th Congress as a 'pocket veto'", but "it was returned to the House and is considered to be a 'regular veto'" — which is why a claimed pocket veto does not appear in his row. Where the disputed bills became law instead, they are not counted as vetoes at all: two attempted intra-session pocket vetoes in the 101st Congress "were disputed. Both bills were enacted into law so are not counted on this table", the Senate notes, and CRS says the same of the same pair: "These two disputed vetoes are not included in Table 1".

The two counts do not drift apart, and CRS says why: its table note records that "Recent Presidents and Congresses disagree about what constitutes a pocket veto. This table defers to the Senate's count of pocket vetoes." CRS's own pocket figure, "1,066 (41.4%)", is the Senate's number.

Drafted from primary source documents by LegislationPatch's automated research pipeline, then reviewed, verified, and edited by James Shearn, Editor. Every figure and citation is checked against the official text before publication. See our editorial standards and AI disclosure.