Specter is making a ‘statement’

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has caved to White House demands on a wide variety of issues, but when it comes to presidential signing statements, the Pennsylvania senator has actually been pretty good. A year ago, he even tried to introduce legislation that would allow Congress to sue the president over his use of these legally dubious documents. He asked at the time, “What’s the point of having a statute if … the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn’t like? … If he doesn’t like the bill, let him veto it.”

Not surprisingly, Specter’s Republican colleagues quickly would put the kibosh on the proposal. John McCain helped kill the bill, arguing, “I think the president will enforce the law.” (Yes, McCain’s child-like naivete is rather amusing in retrospect.)

Specter, however, is quite right. We have a bizarre dynamic at play: Congress passes bills, Bush signs the bills into law, and then, in several instances, after the president issues signing statements, the Bush administration decides not to do what the law mandated. Bush has actually used signing statements to challenge more than 1,100 sections of legislation he’s signed into law — more than every other president in U.S. history combined

Thanks to a more reasonable Senate majority, Specter is giving his bill another shot.

Frustrated by the Bush administration’s continued use of presidential signing statements to challenge or ignore provisions of Congressionally approved legislation, Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has reintroduced legislation to rein in President Bush’s ability to use the tactic. Specter, who has long been a critic of Bush’s use of signing statements, quietly introduced his Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2007 on Friday. “The president cannot use a signing statement to rewrite the words of a statute nor can he use a signing statement to selectively nullify those provisions he does not like,” Specter said in a floor statement.

Specter added, “If the president is permitted to rewrite the bills that Congress passes and cherry-pick which provisions he likes and does not like, he subverts the constitutional process designed by our framers.” (To which the White House apparently responded, “Duh.”)



For what it’s worth, the GAO recently found multiple instances of the administration willfully ignoring provisions of laws the president signed, justified by Bush’s dubious signing statements. The GAO report might help the debate.

Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers. In a report to Congress, the non partisan Government Accountability Office studied a small sample of the bill provisions that Bush has signed into law but also challenged with signing statements. The GAO found that agencies disobeyed six such laws, while enforcing 10 others as written even though Bush had challenged them. House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers , Democrat of Michigan, said yesterday that the GAO’s findings demonstrated a need for a more “extensive review” of how the government has followed up on hundreds of other laws challenged by Bush. “The administration is thumbing its nose at the law,” said Conyers, one of the lawmakers who commissioned the GAO study.

With Specter’s help, maybe there’ll actually be some progress on the issue — just in time for the next president.