Signing Statement Silence

By David Swanson

Every major pseudo peace movement organization in the country, afraid to actually urge Congress to cut off the money for the illegal occupation of Iraq, believed it was really important to set up a commission to probe contractor waste in Iraq, and to once again ban the construction and maintenance of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Every open-government and whistleblowers group backed the expansion of protections for whistleblowers and the requirement that intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents.

This week President Bush signed the Defense Authorization bill into law, and then added a statement announcing his right to violate these four provisions. And the silence is deafening.

The Guardian newspaper in England, and the Boston Globe wrote serious reports.

The Associated Press wrote an article that touched on the topic but missed the point.

The Virginian Pilot wrote an article that followed Senator Jim Webb's lead and avoided the central problem.

Senators Casey, Levin, and Webb made remarks that failed to challenge Bush's abuse of power or mention the word "impeachment."

The House of Representatives maintained a total and absolute silence.

And activist groups followed suit.

And they look like fools or hypocrites. All of them.

Yes, previous presidents have written signing statements, but never to announce their right to violate laws, only to express opinions about the laws that they were going to, as a matter of their essential duty as president, enforce.

Yes, a signing statement announcing the right to violate a law, and the actual violation are two different things.

Yes, a signing statement should be meaningless.

But the Supreme Court cites them and the Bush-Cheney administration acts on them. This is not the first time Bush has given himself the right to violate bans on permanent military bases, and he has continued to violate those bans. Bush and Cheney routinely refuse to provide Congress with information, to sanction contractor abuse, and to punish whistleblowers. These behaviors will continue, just as will torture and warrentless spying and various other activities that this administration derives the right to engage in from signing statements.

The Government Accountability Office found last year that in a small sample of these signing statements the Bush-Cheney administration had already followed through on violating 30 percent of the laws it claimed the right to violate. The corporate media now spins this as glass-half-full news (more than half the time he doesn't mean it! hurray!).

Last January the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the matter, laying bare the violation of constitutional separation of powers. A Justice Department official testified that the president could violate any law he liked until the Supreme Court told him to stop.

Any fourth grader who has seen the Constitution could tell you he was wrong. Sadly, in our new reality, he was right.

I heard this reported on the radio this morning. Basically Bush has said FU, laws don't mean a pound of shit to me.

I would think Congress would be on the warpath.

I would expect legal challenges.

I would expect general outrage.

Yet, there is barely a whimper.

This sure isn't the good old USA that I grew up in.

With President Bush, you always have to read the footnotes.

Just before Monday night’s State of the Union speech, in which Mr. Bush extolled bipartisanship, railed against government excesses and promised to bring the troops home as soon as it’s safe to withdraw, the White House undermined all of those sentiments with the latest of the president’s infamous signing statements.

The signing statements are documents that earlier presidents generally used to trumpet their pleasure at signing a law, or to explain how it would be enforced. More than any of his predecessors, the current chief executive has used the pronouncements in a passive-aggressive way to undermine the power of Congress.

Over the last seven years, Mr. Bush has issued hundreds of these insidious documents declaring that he had no intention of obeying a law that he had just signed. This is not just constitutional theory. Remember the detainee treatment act, which Mr. Bush signed and then proceeded to ignore, as he told C.I.A. interrogators that they could go on mistreating detainees?

This week’s statement was attached to the military budget bill, which covers everything except the direct cost of the war. The bill included four important provisions that Mr. Bush decided he will enforce only if he wants to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/opinion/30wed1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

mistreating detainees?

It seems the congress is content to let him defy everything that we used to hold dear.

That my question..

This is an outrage. I eagerly await Obama's constructive, measured, unifying response to fascism.

No investigation into corruption - the billions we gave to contractors.
No protection for those brave souls who help to expose it, aka whistle blowers.
No cooperation from intelligence to oversight.
Yes, to using funds for permanent bases.

No accountability. No protest.

But $196 billion for 2008, and Unitary Executive demands another $70 billion down payment for 2009. No money for social security, which is an entitlement we can't afford. $4Billion a week for corrupt GOP defense contractors who torture and spy on us - that we can afford.

there was only one opposition politician left in the Diet.

This was a change from the multi-party system that had existed in the 1910s and 1920s.

It's happening here, too.

Where are the Dems of yesteryear, the ones who forced a sitting president to resign in 1973?

I wonder if the one bit of "party discipline" that Reid and Pelosi are enforcing is telling the activists to shut up.

as part of the fabric of government . . . first they ceded their power to make war, exclusive to Congress under the Constitution . . . and now they're effectively telling this and every future president that he or she can disregard the laws that Congress passes, with no fear of retribution or even accountability . . .

shameful, stupid, and cowardly . . . and no way to run a bridge club, much less a country . . .

are already institutionalized. They have been used by almost every President in the last century. The current President of course leads in the signing statement category by a huge margin. A signing statement may not be illegal until it is acted upon. Then it is up to the Congress to challenge the President on failing to carry out a legislative directive from Congress. As you have stated, either the President has not acted on his signing statements or Congress has abrogated their responsibility.