President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
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Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.
Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts....
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Our Monarch-in-Chief
The Boston Globe has a great article today about the way our monarch-in-chief systematically signs laws into place and then follows them up with signing statements absolving himself of the need to follow the law:
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2 comments:
Mr. Clinton did the same thing.
Nice try, but if you read the whole article you will see that Clinton issued 140 signing statements to state his reasons for objecting to bills, not to say he was going to ignore them. In addition, as the article said, Clinton and his predecessors did something regularly that the Bush has never done; they vetoed bills they disagreed with, publicly stating their reasons for the veto and giving Congress the opportunity to try and override the vetoes. Our current President simply signs the bill and then issues a signing statement saying he is going to ignore it. The supremely ironic point is that he does it to a Congress controlled by his own party. This is not a partisan issue. It is a constitutional issue. The President is ignoring the constitution and his lap-dog Congressional leadership lets him get away with it. Or at least they did. They are finally waking up.
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