A couple of weeks ago, Senator Arlen Specter introduced the "Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2007," (S. 1747), which is mostly an update of the bill he introduced a year ago, the "Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2006." Now there is a House version of Specter's bill.
Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (D. NH) has introduced HR 3045, "The Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2007." The bill is identical to Specter's bill, complete with all the problems.
In her press release, she includes all sorts of incorrect facts. First is the rhetoric, which continues to ignore the larger problem that the signing statement has become an institutional prerogative of the executive branch, used systematically for over 25 years. She writes:
President Bush has trampled on the constitutional separation of powers through his abuse of signing statements. He has attempted to usurp power that was given to the Congress, not the President, and has severely bruised the system of checks and balances. This is an insult to the founders of this country and to the American people, and it cannot be allowed to continue.
He has attempted to usurp power? She later gives us a lesson in constitutional process: "Every third grader learns about separation of powers and checks and balances--the Congress writes the laws and the President signs them...nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the President can approve part of a law and ignore the rest." Yet in one of her examples of a signing statement used to challenge a provision of a bill, she highlights a legislative veto provision as an example of the usurping of power. Yet the the legislative veto orders the executive branch agencies into a particular course of action without backing it up by law. If we take her sterile view of the process, Congress is supposed to "present" the president will a bill for his consideration.
In the history of the signing statement, she claims:
* The first president to use the device was Jackson (wrong).The first was Monroe;
* As of April this year, Bush has issued 127 signing statements to challenge over 700 specific provisions of law (wrong). As of April this year, Bush has issued 150 separate statements to challenge 1,149 specific provisions of law;
She also lists a number of signing statements where there is no evidence that they were used to influence implementation. She uses, as her source, the ABA report from last summer and not the GAO report from this summer.
This is precisely why Congress is both behind the curve on the signing statement and unable to come up with legitimate counters to the use of the device. I have contacted a number of congresspersons offering my assistance in helping them understand what the signing statement is and how it is used, as well as acting as a sounding board for proposed reactions to the use of the signing statement, and to date my phone grows dusty from lack of use. At some point I am going to have to wash my hands of them!
