Nat Hentoff: Bush's Invisible Ink
"The Constitution is not what the President [alone] says it is." —American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine, July 24.
When George W. Bush signs a bill from Congress into law, he adds a "signing statement"—more of them than any of his predecessors—that he will not enforce that law if it impedes his inherent constitutional authority as head of "the unitary executive." (Press secretary Tony Snow brushes these off as "little statements."
In Bush's first term, he has, as the Associated Press notes, issued at least 750 of these—"reserving the right to revise, interpret, or disregard laws.
Most notoriously, after a televised White House surrender to Senator John McCain, Bush signed a law including McCain's banning of "cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment" of U.S. detainees—but then, in a signing statement, he said he could ignore that part of the law in the war on terrorism.
The increasingly intense national debate on the president's bypassing the representatives of the people whenever he chooses has even reached the comic pages. On August 1, in The Record, a daily newspaper in Bergen, New Jersey, Wiley Miller's strip Non Sequitor shows a father remonstrating with his small son: "I hear you don't think you have to clean your room."
"Well," says the child, "while I grant you the existence and legitimacy of your rules, I've enacted the power of a signing statement that makes me the exception to those rules."
On July 13, on the editorial page of The Lufkin Daily News, serving a small community in Texas, supporters of Bush's frequent use of signing statements are asked if they're "willing to provide such leeway in skirting laws to a President Hillary Clinton? Or a President John Kerry? We doubt it."
Of much greater concern to the White House than those barbs is a stinging American Bar Association task force report—summarized by ABA President Michael Greco—accusing Bush of violating his oath of office by signing a law and then refusing to enforce it.
This ignoring of Bush's oath of office, says Greco, "is made clear in Article I of the Constitution, in the so-called 'presentment clause,' which decrees that a president must accept or reject a law as a whole. He cannot pick and choose the parts he likes. . . . The president must sign or veto a law as a whole."
Greco, who has become the immediate past president of the ABA since the report, his term having ended, reminded the president that Tom Paine, in stoking the fires that led to the American Revolution, "famously remarked that, in England the king was the law, but in America the law is king." (Emphasis added.)
Or, as Bush's very first predecessor, a fellow named George Washington, put it, the president "must approve all the parts of a bill or reject it in toto."...
Read entire article at Village Voice
When George W. Bush signs a bill from Congress into law, he adds a "signing statement"—more of them than any of his predecessors—that he will not enforce that law if it impedes his inherent constitutional authority as head of "the unitary executive." (Press secretary Tony Snow brushes these off as "little statements."
In Bush's first term, he has, as the Associated Press notes, issued at least 750 of these—"reserving the right to revise, interpret, or disregard laws.
Most notoriously, after a televised White House surrender to Senator John McCain, Bush signed a law including McCain's banning of "cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment" of U.S. detainees—but then, in a signing statement, he said he could ignore that part of the law in the war on terrorism.
The increasingly intense national debate on the president's bypassing the representatives of the people whenever he chooses has even reached the comic pages. On August 1, in The Record, a daily newspaper in Bergen, New Jersey, Wiley Miller's strip Non Sequitor shows a father remonstrating with his small son: "I hear you don't think you have to clean your room."
"Well," says the child, "while I grant you the existence and legitimacy of your rules, I've enacted the power of a signing statement that makes me the exception to those rules."
On July 13, on the editorial page of The Lufkin Daily News, serving a small community in Texas, supporters of Bush's frequent use of signing statements are asked if they're "willing to provide such leeway in skirting laws to a President Hillary Clinton? Or a President John Kerry? We doubt it."
Of much greater concern to the White House than those barbs is a stinging American Bar Association task force report—summarized by ABA President Michael Greco—accusing Bush of violating his oath of office by signing a law and then refusing to enforce it.
This ignoring of Bush's oath of office, says Greco, "is made clear in Article I of the Constitution, in the so-called 'presentment clause,' which decrees that a president must accept or reject a law as a whole. He cannot pick and choose the parts he likes. . . . The president must sign or veto a law as a whole."
Greco, who has become the immediate past president of the ABA since the report, his term having ended, reminded the president that Tom Paine, in stoking the fires that led to the American Revolution, "famously remarked that, in England the king was the law, but in America the law is king." (Emphasis added.)
Or, as Bush's very first predecessor, a fellow named George Washington, put it, the president "must approve all the parts of a bill or reject it in toto."...