President Bush has gotten into a bad habit of using his executive powers to distance himself from laws passed by Congress that contain provisions he doesn’t like.
Rather than veto bills outright, he routinely signs statements taking exception to all or parts of the measures – in essence giving executive agencies permission to ignore the law.
Bush isn’t the first president to issue a signing statement – that honor, if honor it be, falls to James Monroe. But until the 1980s, such statements were mostly rhetorical tributes to the sponsors or beneficiaries of such bills, such as honoring “our brave veterans.” Only 75 such statements were issued before Ronald Reagan became President. But Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton produced 247 signing statements among them, some of them quite substantive.
George W. Bush has been more prolific and more contentious than even his three immediate predecessors, issuing 134 statements as of last year, affecting more than 1,100 sections of bills. Scholars and critics worry that he may be carrying the practice to a degree that disregards the Constitution – which assigns to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Bush has said he doesn’t need to execute laws he believes are unconstitutional. If that’s the case, he has the power to veto entire bills, which is the presidential function that allows the executive branch to check the powers of the legislature.
He shouldn’t use signing statements as a backdoor way of achieving the kind of line-item veto the Constitution doesn’t give to American presidents.
House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., have wisely called for a more extensive review of bill provisions that Bush has objected to in these signing statements.
Their action followed a General Accounting Office report last week that found Bush has disobeyed new laws challenged in his signing statements.
While the GAO studied only a small sample of provisions that Bush had objected to in signing statements in fiscal year 2006, it found that 30 percent of the time those provisions were not followed according to law.
Administration officials reply that Bush has the executive power to interpret how laws should be carried out. Bush has claimed the authority to ignore more provisions of bills passed by Congress than all presidents combined and with greater contempt for Congress. The laws range from a torture ban to whistleblower protections for nuclear regulatory officials and oversight provisions in the Patriot Act.
Congress needs to review the extent of the Bush administration’s actions to see if they go beyond legitimate clarifications and reservations. If the administration’s actions exceed its executive authority, lawmakers need to insist that Bush start obeying the laws he himself has signed.
The next president will face enough challenges without having to clean up a constitutional mess.
