Bush doesn't bother with vetoes;he just doesn't enforce things he dislikes

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/opinion/05fri1.html?ex=1147060800&en=87239053bb24d4b8&ei=5087%0A

Veto? Who Needs a Veto?

Published: May 5, 2006

One of the abiding curiosities of the Bush administration is that after more than five years in office, the president has yet to issue a veto. No one since Thomas Jefferson has stayed in the White House this long without rejecting a single act of Congress. Some people attribute this to the Republicans' control of the House and the Senate, and others to Mr. Bush's reluctance to expend political capital on anything but tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq. Now, thanks to a recent article in The Boston Globe, we have a better answer.

President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750 "presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of prisoners.

In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the will of America's elected lawmakers. And as usual, the Republican majority in Congress simply looked the other way.

Many of the signing statements reject efforts to curb Mr. Bush's out-of-control sense of his powers in combating terrorism. In March, after frequent pious declarations of his commitment to protecting civil liberties, Mr. Bush issued a signing statement that said he would not obey a new law requiring the Justice Department to report on how the F.B.I. is using the Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers if he decided that such reporting could impair national security or executive branch operations.

In another case, the president said he would not instruct the military to follow a law barring it from storing illegally obtained intelligence about Americans. Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bush had already authorized the National Security Agency, which is run by the Pentagon, to violate the law by eavesdropping on Americans' conversations and reading Americans' e-mail without getting warrants.

"...stop doodling in the margins, dummy. Just sign the thing and go back to sleep."

'Signing statements' my ass. What a twat.

to save his political capital. Can you imagine how huge the blogosphere would be with all of the reactions we would have to *'s vetoing all the laws he has no intention of living with? He would go from a zero veto Prezidnent to the biggest vetoer of all time in nothing flat and Congress would get even less done than it does now.

simply not enforcing a law has always been one of the executive branch's checks on the legislative branch.

but picking out certain portions of a law (for instance, the part that lets you spend money) and ignoring the rest of it (the part that say what you can spend the money on) is not kosher. it's a non-overridable line-item veto.


worse, his "signing statements" sometimes bear no similarity to the law. he could sign a law that says "you can't pollute" and then tack on a signing statement that say, "i interpret this law to mean that i can wiretap anyone i want"

for all their whining about judges "legislating from the bench", this amounts to "legislating from the oval office".

later, Senator Jar Jar Binks will be manipulated to call for a vote of no confidence, and the Imperial Senate will soon after be dissolved...

* is going outside of, around, underneath, and above the Constitution.

Treason.

Impeachment.

I don't think he knows a thing about the constitution or any other legal document. His puppeteers tell him "we're going to attack Iraq tonight", and he gets all giddy, never even wondering if he has any legal authority to do it.