Editorial
Veto? Who Needs a Veto?
Published: May 5, 2006
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/opinion/05fri1.html?ex=
1146974400&en=9944ed0b3a5f414e&ei=5070
One of the abiding curiosities of the Bush administration is that after
more than five years in office, the president has yet to issue a veto.
No one since Thomas Jefferson has stayed in the White House this long
without rejecting a single act of Congress. Some people attribute this
to the Republicans' control of the House and the Senate, and others to
Mr. Bush's reluctance to expend political capital on anything but tax
cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq. Now, thanks to a recent
article in The Boston Globe, we have a better answer.
President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his
intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The
Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750
"presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws
required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that
he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of
prisoners.
In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the
open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in
question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to
ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the
will of America's elected lawmakers. And as usual, the Republican
majority in Congress simply looked the other way.
Many of the signing statements reject efforts to curb Mr. Bush's out-of-
control sense of his powers in combating terrorism. In March, after
frequent pious declarations of his commitment to protecting civil
liberties, Mr. Bush issued a signing statement that said he would not
obey a new law requiring the Justice Department to report on how the
F.B.I. is using the Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize
papers if he decided that such reporting could impair national security
or executive branch operations.
In another case, the president said he would not instruct the military to
follow a law barring it from storing illegally obtained intelligence
about Americans. Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bush had already
authorized the National Security Agency, which is run by the Pentagon, to
violate the law by eavesdropping on Americans' conversations and reading
Americans' e-mail without getting warrants.
We know from this sort of bitter experience that the president is not
simply expressing philosophical reservations about how a particular law
may affect the war on terror. The signing statements are not even all
about national security. Mr. Bush is not willing to enforce a law
protecting employees of nuclear-related agencies if they report misdeeds
to Congress. In another case, he said he would not turn over scientific
information "uncensored and without delay" when Congress needed it.
(Remember the altered environmental reports?)
Mr. Bush also demurred from following a law forbidding the Defense
Department to censor the legal advice of military lawyers. (Remember the
ones who objected to the torture-is-legal policy?) Instead, his signing
statement said military lawyers are bound to agree with political
appointees at the Justice Department and the Pentagon.
The founding fathers never conceived of anything like a signing statement.
The idea was cooked up by Edwin Meese III, when he was the attorney
general for Ronald Reagan, to expand presidential powers. He was helped
by a young lawyer who was a true believer in the unitary presidency, a
euphemism for an autocratic executive branch that ignores Congress and
the courts. Unhappily, that lawyer, Samuel Alito Jr., is now on the
Supreme Court.
Since the Reagan era, other presidents have issued signing statements to
explain how they interpreted a law for the purpose of enforcing it, or
to register narrow constitutional concerns. But none have done it as
profligately as Mr. Bush. (His father issued about 232 in four years,
and Bill Clinton 140 in eight years.) And none have used it so clearly
to make the president the interpreter of a law's intent, instead of
Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts.
Like many of Mr. Bush's other imperial excesses, this one serves no
legitimate purpose. Congress is run by a solid and iron-fisted
Republican majority. And there is actually a system for the president to
object to a law: he vetoes it, and Congress then has a chance to
override the veto with a two-thirds majority.
That process was good enough for 42 other presidents. But it has the
disadvantage of leaving the chief executive bound by his oath of office
to abide by the result. This president seems determined not to play by
any rules other than the ones of his own making. And that includes the
Constitution.
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