fuckhead vows to veto Foreign Operations Budget passed yesterday

Dismissing these statements because they carry so little legal force is as dangerous as writing off any of Bush's other extreme legal claims to boundless authority. Because while these cases slowly wend their way through the court system, there are real-life consequences to Bush's policies—and especially his torture policies—on the ground.

First, consider the substance of Bush's statements. Of the 505 constitutional objections he has raised over the years, Cooper found the most frequent to be the 82 instances in which Bush disputed the bill's constitutionality because Article II of the Constitution does not permit any interference with his "power to supervise the unitary executive." That's not an objection to some act of Congress. That's an objection to Congressional authority itself. Similarly, Cooper counted 77 claims that as president, Bush has "exclusive power over foreign affairs" and 48 claims of "authority to determine and impose national security classification and withhold information." Bush consistently uses these statements to prune back congressional authority and even—as he does in the McCain statement—to limit judicial review. He uses them to assert and reassert that his is the last word on a law's constitutional application to the executive. As he has done throughout the war on terror, Bush arrogates phenomenal new constitutional power for himself and, as Cooper notes, "these powers were often asserted without supporting authorities, or even serious efforts at explanation."

And if you believe that all this executive self-aggrandizement is meaningless until and unless a court has given it force, you are missing the whole point of a signing statement: These statements are directed at federal agencies and their lawyers. One of their main historical purposes was to afford agencies a glance at how the president wants a statute to be enforced. As Jack Balkin observed almost immediately after the McCain bill, signing statements represent the president's signal to his subordinates about how he plans to enforce a law. And when a president deliberately advises his subordinates that they may someday be asked to join him in breaking a law, he muddies the legal waters, as well as the chain of command.

--snippage--

Should we dismiss these statements just because President Bush is so brazen in his claims? So willing to take legal positions that are undefended because they're legally indefensible? Will all this just go away someday, when a court dismisses these statements as excessive and unfounded? No. Because President Bush isn't trying to win this war in the courts. Thus far, he has faced each legal setback as though it never happened; or—more often—he's recast it as a victory. He doesn't care what the courts someday make of his signing statements, just as he didn't care what the courts made of his enemy-combatant claims. He views the courts as irrelevant in his pursuit of this war. These signing statements are dangerous because they repeat and normalize—always using seemingly boilerplate language—claims about the boundless powers of a "unitary executive." By questioning the principle of court review in the McCain statement, Bush again erodes the notion of judicial supremacy—an idea we have lived with since Marbury v. Madison. When he asserts that he—and not the courts—is the final arbiter of his constitutional powers, he is calling for a radical shift in the system of checks and balances.

It's so tempting to laugh off Bush's signing statements as puffed-up, groundless claims that he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and also devastatingly handsome. But this is the president talking and instructing his subordinates—and also outlining a broad legal regime that may not technically be constitutional, but that hardly makes it laughable. These declarations promote a view of the law that may have no merit in the courts but may never have the chance to be resolved there in the first place.

In 2003, lawmakers tried to get a handle on Bush's use of signing statements by passing a Justice Department spending bill that required the department to inform Congress whenever the administration decided to ignore a legislative provision on constitutional grounds.

Bush signed the bill, but issued a statement asserting his right to ignore the notification requirement.