Knight Ridder newspapers first reported in January (and it was noted on this blog) about how President Bush has quietly been using “signing statements” to attach his own interpretation of legislation and signal whether he wants agencies to implement new laws. But he may be using the practice even more than originally reported.
The Boston Globe reported this week that Bush has issued more than 750 such statements — 250 more than reported in January. And that earlier total was already twice as many as the combined number of statements that President Clinton and former President Bush issued.
“Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ‘whistle-blower’ protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research,” the Globe reported.
The Globe also noted: “Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.
“Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ’signing statements’ — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.”
There is a lot of worry about activist judges not following the rule of law and the clear intentions of the legislative branch, but the bigger abuser may be an activist president.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is a Democrat, like Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. He’s also somebody being mentioned for higher office, like Sebelius. But Richardson recently did something Sebelius likely won’t do: got a concealed-carry license.
Richardson, a hunter, happily signed New Mexico’s concealed-carry law in 2003 and signed another last year lowering the minimum age to 21 and doubling licenses’ length. Of his conceal-carry permit, Richardson said: “I just wanted to symbolically show my support for concealed carry. I don’t anticipate carrying one.”
Sebelius, of course, vetoed a similar bill this year in Kansas, only to see her veto overridden by a bipartisan group of legislators.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., and Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in an op-ed piece for The New York Times that the American people must move past the idea that our only two options in Iraq are “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now.” The two presented a five-step alternative:
“The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests. We could drive this in place with irresistible sweeteners for the Sunnis to join in, a plan designed by the military for withdrawing and redeploying American forces, and a regional nonaggression pact.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
The buzz is growing about a possible change of hands in one or both houses of Congress in November, but it could just be wishful Democratic thinking. Columnist Steve Kraske counted the reasons why in The Kansas City Star: The power of incumbency. The multitude of safe seats, thanks to politically savvy redistricting. Democrats’ failure to recruit top candidates. And the nation’s continuing conservative bent. And though Kraske rightly notes that Rep. Jim Ryun (in photo), R-Topeka, probably should be facing a tough fight, having had to deny making a “sweet real estate deal” related to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, it’s hard to imagine Democratic challenger Nancy Boyda doing better than she did two years ago. And in Kansas, Kraske notes, “the last incumbent to lose was Republican Vince Snowbarger in 1998.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Mulling how politics is like high school, New York Times’ columnist David Brooks recently argued: “Nobody has ever voted for a presidential candidate they wouldn’t have had lunch with in high school.” And along that same thought line: “Bill Clinton was unique in that he was a member of every clique at once.” In the end, Brooks said, “we never escape our high school selves” — a thoroughly depressing conclusion he punctuated with “Vote for Pedro.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
During the roundtable Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” columnist George Will had this to say about rising gas prices: “I blame God. The intelligent designer of the universe, for whatever reason, put the oil under some turbulent places — Nigeria, Venezuela, the Caspian basin, the Middle East.”
Added Newsweek International’s Fareed Zakaria: “It may be the other way around. When you have oil in the ground, you tend to produce highly dysfunctional, corrupt political systems.”
Will concluded: “The curse of natural resources.”
So maybe getting 60 percent of our oil from overseas has an upside.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A Family Research Council debate last week in Washington, D.C., was a tough crowd for Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., given that, by a ratio of 9 to 1, the council’s socially conservative members believe illegal immigrants should be “detected, arrested and returned to their country of origin.” But Brownback argued for the Senate plan he helped craft with his usual power: “We all came from somewhere. If I have no option to feed my family in any legitimate way, we can see ourselves maybe jumping across the line ourselves. . . . I don’t want to face my maker without every day, every minute, having tried to have done what I think is the moral thing to do, even if it’s politically difficult.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
