Thread: Bush Exempts Himself From the Laws Enacted by Congress

Greenfield: Why presidential signing statements matters

By Jeff Greenfield
CNN Senior Analyst

(CNN) -- Sen. Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, held hearings Tuesday on presidential signing statements.

No need to stop the presses, right?

Actually, this is a very big deal -- it goes to the heart of how power should be shared between the president and Congress ... and in fact it's always been a very big deal.

Here's the question: Can a president say when he signs a bill the Congress passed, "I'll interpret the law as I see it"?

That's what Bush did when he signed Sen. John McCain's anti-torture legislation in December, asserting that ''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president . . . as commander in chief.

That's a polite way of saying, "If I don't like the law the Congress passed, I'll ignore it."

The Congress has always pushed back when it thinks the president is challenging its turf.

When President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, the heavily Democratic Senate said no, and FDR lost a lot of political clout.

In the early '50s, a GOP Congress tried to pass a constitutional amendment limiting the president's treaty-making power.

During Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, permitting him to answer an alleged attack on U.S. naval forces, to escalate the war. Eugene McCarthy actually ran for president in '68 in part to challenge this executive claim.

And President Richard Nixon's refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress, "Impounding" it was called, was one of the potential grounds for impeachment.

In Bush's case, the GOP-controlled Congress has been relatively mild in challenging its own president's tendency to impose his -- rather than the Congress' -- sense of what the law just passed actually means. The Boston Globe counts more than 750 instances in which the president has reserved the right to ignore any statute that conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Critics, including the libertarian-minded CATO Institute, accuse the president of circumventing the Constitution's balance of powers provisions, in what a CATO Institute report calls "A ... push for power unchecked by either the courts or Congress."

Tuesday morning, I talked with several Republican senators, who expressed concerns over the executive branch's assertion of power; but none appeared ready or eager to support any kind of frontal challenge to the White House, not in a post 9/11 world, and not with midterm elections on the horizon.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/27/ ... index.html

We desperately need to find a way to impeach this "man who would be king".

Why should this surprise anyone? Bush has been doing this for years and all of a sudden people realize this? Wake up, he doesn't enforce immigration laws at all and nobody brings that up in the press. This idiot boldly says that he won't enforce our immigration laws unless he gets new laws that he likes. Hello, why don't people see what I'm seeing here? This bum should have been impeached years ago. Of course Congress will just give lipservice to this and continue to let Dictator Jorge do whatever he wants.

Our government is worthless and clueless in every way!