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tazzygirl -> RE: Impeachment talk (3/4/2011 11:59:07 PM)
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Historically, signing statements have served a largely innocuous and ceremonial
function. They are issued by the President to explain his reasons for signing a bill into
law. A signing statement thus serves to promote public awareness and discourse in
much the same way as a veto message. Controversy arises when a signing statement is
used not to extol the virtues of the bill being signed into law, but to simultaneously
condemn a provision of the new law as unconstitutional and announce the President’s
refusal to enforce the unconstitutional provision. This refusal to enforce laws represents
a controversial exercise of presidential power, but it is crucial to keep this controversy
distinct from the vehicle by which that power is announced—the signing
statement. There is nothing inherently wrong with or controversial about signing
statements. Most do not contain an assertion of presidential power. For those that do,
the signing statement itself ironically serves the laudable function of promoting accountability.
Even if one rejects the idea that the President may refuse to enforce a law,
at least the President is openly declaring what he plans to do. Put differently, if the
President is to sign a bill into law with his fingers crossed, better that they be crossed
where we can see them than that they be crossed behind his back. The controversy,
then, is not over the use of signing statements but over the assertion of a non-enforcement
power that is sometimes declared in signing statements.
The controversy over whether the President has the authority to refuse to enforce
laws he views as unconstitutional has been sharpened during the current administration
by the frequency with which it has asserted this authority. In a recent and important
study, political science Professor Phillip J. Cooper has analyzed the exercise of this nonenforcement
power by the Bush Administration. He found that President Bush has deployed
the non-enforcement power with unprecedented breadth and frequency—over
500 times during the first term alone. The figures from the study were updated in an
excellent article by Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, which puts the number at
over 750, which is more than all of President Bush’s predecessors combined. As a result,
a front page article in USA Today cataloging the ways in which the Bush Administration
has sought to expand presidential power listed presidential non-enforcement (using the
label “signing statements”) first.
http://www.acslaw.org/files/Kinkopf-Signing%20Statements-Jun%202006-Advance%20Vol%201.pdf
Boston Globe Washington correspondent Charles Savage was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting today for series of articles uncovering the Bush Administration's widespread practice of using "presidential signing statements" to circumvent hundreds of existing laws passed by Congress and signed into law by the president himself.
The articles by Savage brought national attention to a little-known prerogative of presidential power and resulted in Senate oversight hearings and a declaration from the American Bar Association said that such actions were "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers."
Among the laws Bush has said he can ignore include those banning torture, new safeguards in the Patriot Act, various military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, "whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
In his articles, Savage also revealed other behind-the-scenes tactics aimed at expanding presidential power, including the administration's use of political appointees to hire lawyers for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
https://bostonglobe.com/aboutus/pressrel/release.aspx?id=7552
Since the original article by Savage is restricted to subscribers or those who pay...and frankly, Im not going to do either...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles/2006/bush_signing_statements.php
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