The president has challenged a federal ban on torture, a request for data on the administration of the USA Patriot Act and numerous other assertions of congressional power. As recently as December, Bush asserted the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in a signing statement attached to a postal reform bill.

I thought he already had that last power under the PATRIOT Act, but I guess I could be mistaken...

More examples:

Congress directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to relocate its checkpoints around Tucson every seven days to improve efforts to combat illegal immigration. But the agency took the law as an "advisory provision" that was "not always consistent with CBP's mission requirements." Instead, the agency periodically shut down its checkpoints for short periods of time, believing that would comply with congressional demands.

Frustrated by the Pentagon's broad budget submissions for the "global war on terrorism," Congress demanded in its 2006 military spending law that the Defense Department break down its 2007 budget request to show the detailed costs of global military operations, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The department ignored the order.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also ignored Congress's demand that it submit an expenditure plan for housing assistance and alternatives to the approaches that failed after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA told the GAO that it does not normally produce such plans.

So, those meddling democrats decided to investigate.

In appropriations acts for fiscal 2006, [Government Accountability Office] investigators found 160 separate provisions that Bush had objected to in signing statements. They then chose 19 to follow. Of those 19 provisions, six -- nearly a third -- were not carried out according to law. Ten were executed by the executive branch. On three others, conditions did not require an executive branch response.

The GAO investigated 19 of 160 laws, and even out of those 19, 6 of them weren't followed correctly, and 3 didn't require Bush to do anything. So, if this sample is representative, Bush is only actually executing about 50% of these laws he is supposed to be bound by, and breaking about 30% of them.

The line that made me write this diary, however, was this line near the end:

the GAO report suggests that the dispute over signing statements is not an academic one, [Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional lawyer who served on an American Bar Association task force that excoriated the president's use of signing statements in a report last year] said, adding that Congress could use the report to take collective legal action against the White House.

We have a conservative lawyer quoted in a paper that leans more to the right every day, saying that congress could take legal action against the White House. Sounds like impeachment to me.

It's obvious we have the public support for impeachment... why haven't we started yet? What are we waiting for?