The Bush administration's 'king's X'

Star-Telegram | Jim Wright:

“President Bush has been pushing the envelope of presidential power in ways that are increasingly alarming to many political scientists and constitutional scholars. ... Now comes a discovery by news sources that Bush has been routinely (in a very great many observed instances) attempting to nullify, or modify the carrying out of, numerous legal requirements in bills while in the very process of signing them. This has been done by a little-known device called a presidential signing statement. No, this is not the speech or news release that presidents often give at public bill-signing ceremonies. It is, instead, a privately drafted argument or directive that, only in recent years, has been incorporated by government printers as a sort of presidentially written addendum to the actual bill. This process has allowed the president to sign the bill while trying to alter or modify its enforcement or its legal interpretation by the courts, without vetoing and thus giving Congress the constitutional opportunity to override.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

President Bush didn't invent the Presidential signing statement. He has just used it much more frequently than any previous President. In the past, it was used to clarify ambiguous language, giving the President an opportunity to document his own understanding of the law.

On the surface, this is reasonable. In future court cases that turn on the precise wording of legislation, judges will sometimes rely on the debate that preceded the passage of the legislation in an attempt to divine the meaning of the lawmakers. Presidential signing papers can be useful in the same way to future generations of judges. They carry no more, and maybe less, weight than the Congressional Record. How much weight either has is determined by future judges as they apply the law as written. In the end, the Constitution means what the Supreme Court justices say it means, no matter what the President says.

Or at least that's the way we've always been taught. President Bush has taken to use signing statements to issue Constitutional challenges to Congress. Congress passes a law forbidding torture, President Bush signs the bill into law, but issues a signing statement implying that he sees his Presidential powers granted by the Constitution as overriding any restrictions passed by Congress. The President is announcing to the world that he won't be bound by the law. The possibility for Constitutional crisis is real, or at least would be if a Republican Congress didn't so willingly surrender power to a Republican President in time of war.

Time will pass. The players and issues will change. But the precedent established today, the power granted the President in our time, is something that lasts for generations. The power being given our President today threatens the checks and balances that have served our Republic so well for over 200 years. That's reason enough for all, Democrats and Republicans alike, to be alarmed.