Knoller's numbers: President Obama's vetoes

WASHINGTON -- In returning the Keystone Pipeline bill to Congress without his signature on Tuesday, Barack Obama cast only his 3rd veto as president.

In fact, he has cast fewer vetoes than any U.S. President since James Garfield, who only served 200 days in office in 1881.

It has been 4 and a half years since Mr. Obama last cast a veto. His previous two vetoes were:

-December 30, 2009: The president casts the first veto of his presidency of H.J. Res. 64 - a continuing resolution passed by Congress in case the Defense Appropriations bill wasn't enacted in time. But it was enacted in time, so H.J. Res. 64 wasn't needed and Mr. Obama declined to sign it. He pocket vetoed the measure but also returned it unsigned to the Clerk of the House with Memorandum of Disapproval. (The White House described the move as a technicality that the president took out of an abundance of caution.)

-October 7, 2010: The president pocket vetoes H.R. 3808, the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. A pocket veto means he withheld his signature while Congress was on recess. The bill would have mandated that notarizations of mortgages and other financial documents done in one state, including those done electronically, be recognized in other states.

According to U.S. Senate records, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt cast far and away the most vetoes of any president during his 12 years in office: 635. Only 9 of FDR's vetoes were overridden by Congress.

The next most frequent veto caster was Grover Cleveland, who racked up 414 vetoes during his first term as president and another 170 in his 2nd term. Only 7 of his vetoes were overridden.

More recently, George W. Bush cast 12 vetoes of which 4 were overridden; Bill Clinton was 37 and 2; George H.W. Bush was 44 and 1; Ronald Reagan 78 and 8; Jimmy Carter 31 and 2; and Gerald Ford was 66 and 12.

Bill Clinton's veto count does not include the 82 line-item vetoes he cast as president courtesy of the Line-Item Veto Act of 1996. The measure was challenged in court and in 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the federal line-item veto as unconstitutional.