If you check out the News site at the webpage for the White House, you can see why. If you look at the most recent signing statement, which occurred yesterday the 9th, there are more than a dozen hyperlinks on that news day alone. So you go looking for the signing statement, you look at what should be the most obvious link to the signing statement--"President Bush Signs into Law S. 1099," yet clicking it, all you get is the following:
On Thursday, August 9, 2007 the President signed into law:
S. 1099, which extends Federal Employee Health Benefits to United States citizen employees of the Roosevelt Campobello International Park Commission.
If you make it a habit of checking the "News" page each day, you will find that the press office at the White House put one of these links whenever the presidents signs a bill into law. They are not a signing statement, but rather a signing "announcement." So for the seasoned veteran, he or she may have clicked the link above, saw that it was an announcement, and then moved on. Even if that doesn't get you, on the news page for the 9th, there are two links titled "President Bush Signs America COMPETES Act (the clever acronym for the bill). There are also two links for "Fact Sheet: America Competes Act (without the All Caps), a link for a bill that renames a post office, and some other miscellanea mumbo jumbo. If you click the link for "President Bush Signs America COMPETES Act," you find a similar announcement for the link to signing S. 1099. Only if you click the second link, which only slightly alters the first, will you find the actual signing statement. Seems like a lot of stuff crammed around the bill signing statement to be attributable to mere chance, don't you think? And if you continue in earnest to find the actual signing statement, you will find that it is of the garden variety rhetorical statement and not of the challenges which Bush is so famous for. So you may simply just give up looking, which of course is precisely what the administration wants you to do. Stop looking so they can go back to ostentatious challenges in bills of all sizes and sorts (of course we have not gotten to the big appropriations bills yet). So if you want to aggravate the administration, then continue clicking all the links of every page that mentions the fact that a bill has been.
Now the rhetorical signing statements. The three signing statements issued since last week have all been rhetorical signing statements. Remember that a rhetorical signing statement is designed to catch the attention of a particular audience--press, Congress, interest group, and/or the public. Rhetorical signing statements generally say something about the bill and then say good/bad things about Congress. And these three did not disappoint. In the bill under scrutiny here, President Bush throws in a phrase that always gets Americans humming--Bipartisan: "This bipartisan spirit of cooperation continues with the legislation I signed." But a paragraph later, he uses the rhetorical portion as it was intended:
I am, however, disappointed that Congress failed to authorize my Adjunct Teacher Corps program to encourage math and science professionals to teach in our schools. I am also disappointed that the legislation includes excessive authorizations and expansion of government. In total, the bill creates over 30 new programs that are mostly duplicative or counterproductive -- including a new Department of Energy agency to fund late-stage technology development more appropriately left to the private sector -- and also provides excessive authorizations for existing programs. These new programs, additional requirements and reports, and excessive authorizations will divert resources and focus from priority activities aimed at strengthening the basic research that has given our Nation such a competitive advantage in the world economy. Accordingly, I will request funding in my 2009 Budget for those authorizations that support the focused priorities of the ACI, but will not propose excessive or duplicative funding based on authorizations in this bill.
In one paragraph he jabs at Congress for cutting funding that would help American children to be more competitive in math and science--two areas where our children lag way behind other advanced industrialized nations--and secondly he throws that right hook about costly and unnecessary additions that stem from Congress's love of pork (and something he rarely if never complained about when he signed a number of pork laden bills passed by the Republican majority). And don't think that these are jabs that go unnoticed. Not long after President Bush signed the bill did an organization in support of it send out a press release of its own declaring victory for their members.
An organization known as the "Council on Competitiveness" (which shares the name of a White House entity in the Bush I administration that was chaired by VP Quayle) sent out a press release titled "President Signs America COMPETES Act, Major Step Toward National Innovation Agenda." This warms the heart of political operatives inside the Administration who can feel safe in the knowledge that their statement hit a target.
So in conclusion, the theme of this post is as follows: Nothing this White House--or any recent White House--is done for no reason. The decision over what type of message cast as part of the signing statement is the subject of intense inter-office deliberations (in fact, in 1985 it was because someone inside the White House removed a DoJ signing statement that the Reagan administration actually discovered its importance), which is why the president is so aggressive in protecting these inter-office memos. And the decision to provide cover for the signing statement is also a calculated decision designed to throw the scent off the signing statement.
