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Okay, let's say I have to insert my list of items into someone else's document that already has a style defined that controls the line heights. I just want a consistent number of carriage returns. What is the correct HTML for that?

Like Bitt said, you can use inline styles. Any element can contain a style attribute, and it overrides the stylesheet. You can control line height with the line-height style, but don't confuse line-height with margins around a list item. line-height will control the height between lines in the same list item (if you have several lines of text within a <li>), margin, border and padding control the block element's (in this case, the li) spacing.

To see a good demo of the box model for block elements (almost anything in HTML is a block element, a <div> a <table> a <li>), see this page. In your case, you probably just want to add space at the bottom of each list item. Use margin-bottom for that, or the margin shorthand like I have above:

margin: top right bottom left;

To set only the bottom height to be 2 times the size of the current font, use either:

margin-bottom: 2em;

or

margin: 0em 0em 2em 0em;

The shortcut makes it easy to tweak margins later, you won't have to add margin-top, margin-left, etc. I suggest taking a look at CSS Basics, it's a good reference.
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Mark Cushman