New Report Shows Bush's Presidential Signing Statements Have Been Used to Nullify Laws

from Media Consortium, via AlterNet:


New Report Shows Bush's Presidential Signing Statements Have Been Used to Nullify Laws

By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium. Posted June 18, 2007.



A Government Accountability Office report confirms that Bush's use of presidential signing statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases.

Well, it's official: President Bush doesn't much respect the laws Congress passes. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report -- commissioned by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and released today -- confirms that Bush's use of presidential signing statements are, in fact, utterly without precedent.

Though they've been used by American presidents for about 200 years, signing statements -- edicts issued by the president to declare his intent to construe a provision within a law differently than Congress does -- are Constitutionally questionable. But George W. Bush's use of them far exceeds his predecessors', both in number and in severity, and he has consistently used them to flout the will of the legislative branch.

Though the GAO report makes no claims about the legitimacy of Bush's statements or of the use of statements in general, it indicates that, in practice, the statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases. The issues are important: They include accounting for Iraq war funding and security measures for the border patrol.

And that's just from the GAO's inquiry into the 11 signing statements Bush issued against appropriations acts in 2006, which constituted objections to 160 different provisions. Bush has released more than 100 signing statements in his presidency, taking exception to hundreds of provisions of the law.

The report was conducted fairly simply. GAO officials surveyed 19 of last year's 160 objections to determine how the statements had impacted the implementation of laws. According to the report: "We contacted the relevant agencies and asked them how they were executing the provisions. After evaluating the responses we received, we determined that agencies failed to execute six provisions as enacted."

Alongside the failures of law, the reports also list the rationales that the president used to strike down the provisions. For instance, GAO found that, by citing the Unitary Executive Theory, Bush allowed the Department of Defense to exclude "costs for any other contingency operations, such as those in Iraq" as Congress had mandated. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/54543/