It’s hard to quote from this PDF document because the conclusions are so spread out, but if you’ll take the time to read it, you’ll find that the two law professors who wrote it and actually analyzed singing statements by Bush and Clinton found that they were more similar than different.
I would hope President Obama would veto any bill he seriously believed were unconstitutional in any provision, even if it also included things he really, really wanted passed, and return the bill to Congress with an explanation to that effect – and, if Congress were to override the veto, consult with the Solicitor General about bringing a test case before the SCOTUS. That’s the proper way to do it. The president doesn’t get a line-item veto, not even if Congress gives it to him – the SCOTUS already decided that – not even a line-item veto Congress could constitutionally override, let alone a back-door veto that it can’t, which is what W has tried to do with his signing statements.
Here’s a partial list of Bush’s signing statements with the laws and how Bush said he was going to circumvent them. I don’t know of any equivalent list for Clinton but if you feel there is one, you can in turn cite it.
:rolleyes:… Dems and Reps are bought and paid for by the same interests.
Uhm, no. You’re the one making the claim. You produce the cite.
Actually, Nemo, my posts #38 and 41 are cites that refute your claim. For the cite in post #41, start reading on page 12. There are numerous examples of Clinton issuing signing statements that he intended to execute certain laws only in so much as they didn’t infringe on what he saw his constitutional authority to be.
Here’s the thing: Bush is a crappy president. But he’s not a crappy president because he’s done a bunch of things that no other president has done before (contrary to the incorrect statements in the OP). He’s a crappy president largely because he pursued (in my opinion) crappy policies and executed those policies (in most people’s opinion) very poorly.
Depending out how you look at things, you might argue whether or not future presidents will follow the precedent set by Bush of not using the military to attack other countries unless given the consent to do so by Congress. Most of his recent predecessors didn’t bother with that, including Clinton (at least 3 times that I remember). The train left the station long ago on us having an executive branch with seemingly disproportionate authority as compared to Congress. For that you can thank FDR and the New Deal.
Really I think it goes back even further than that. Presidents have always pushed at the limits and fought to expand the powers of the executive branch…and fought fiercely if they thought either of the other two branches were impinging on their own powers. I really don’t see anything Bush has done that has been markedly different than other presidents have. He is pretty much disliked and as you say his POLICIES have been horrible…but he really hasn’t pushed the limits of the president all that far compared to past Presidents and I doubt there will be any legacy at all wrt some new powers of the executive branch.
This is really a re-wrap of the same old hand wringing argument about Bush tossing aside the Constitution and making himself dictator, etc etc, blah blah blah. What is funny to me is how this song and dance will change when President Obama or President Clinton does pretty much exactly the same things (well, hopefully their decisions and policies will be better at least) in exactly the same way.
-XT
While that is true, the thing about the New Deal is that Congress explicitly transfered a lot of its authority to the President because it was not believed that Congress could adequately oversee all the new programs and departments it created. So, yeah, presidents have tended to want to claim as much authority as possible, but back when the government was much smaller, there just wasn’t much authority to grab.
We’ll see, especially wrt Clinton. There isn’t a lot of love for her around here. I expect her policies to be significantly different from Bush’s, but it wouldn’t surprise me if her style was similar. She’s a known for being a control freak and for keeping as much stuff secret as possible. I just hope she doesn’t decide that there are some countries out there needing to be invaded.
I read that document and I don’t see the same thing you do. This document seems to have been written to defend Bush’s practices rather than examine them in an impartial fashion. But even so a few facts show through: the authors point out that not all signing statements are equal - some are just bloviating about how much the president loves this law or whining about how he hates it but his veto was overriden. These have no legal weight. The important ones are the signing statements in which the president states what his plans are for this law.
So while Clinton did issue 381 signing statements during his administration, 323 of them were what the authors described as rhetorical or legislative history. Only 70 of Clinton’s signing statements offered any challenge to the law they were attached to and these challenges affected a total of 144 sections of the law. Bush in contrast had only issued a total of 131 signing statements (as of June 2006) but 106 of them offered challenges and they affected 844 sections of the law. These numbers show that not only is Bush using signing statements in a much more focused way as a means of challenging the law, he’s also making much broader claims. Averaged out by year, Bush challenged 162 sections of the law each year via signing statements while Clinton challenged 18.
So I guess the line is “Clinton did it too but Bush does it nine times as much.”
And like signing statements, not all challenges are equal either. The authors show quotes where Bush and Clinton used the same language in their challenges and treats them as if they were equal. But the actual challenges they were making with this language was different. The first example they gave was of Bush and Clinton both saying they would present such measures as they deemed necessary and expedient in response to a Congressional act saying they wanted reports on certain issues. But it’s clear from the context of the statements that Clinton was using that phrase to claim the power to supervise the issuance of these reports while Bush was using the same phrase to claim the power to decide whether or not the reports would be issued. This is typical of their two approaches to these challenges: Clinton raised issues about how he was going to follow Congressional direction and Bush raises issues about if he was going to follow Congressional direction.
So while Clinton and Bush both made signing statements about laws, Clinton as far as I can see never made any claim that he had the power to ignore a law if he chose. Bush has - repeatedly.