President Bush's Signing Laws to Protect Him From Our Laws: "Imminent Threat to U.S. Constitution"

Dan Froomkin tackles the subject of the "blistering" report by the blue-ribbon panel from the American Bar Association now trying to urge Congress to investigate how Mr. Bush has used these signing statements in his less than six years in office than all other American presidents combined: all to keep him from having to live by the same laws that you and I do.

Paraphrasing Froomkin, unless the Republican-led Congress - which has frequently served only as a rubber stamp to everything Bush wants - takes this report seriously, we're looking at an acquiescence to an executive power grab the likes of which we have never before known in American history. I agree wholeheartedly: my only question is why this has garnered so very little attention until now.

While the White House and Bush loyalists are already condemning the ABA as some hopeless far lefty ideological shill, the White House has repeatedly PRAISED the ABA when it agrees with them (approving righty Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, for example). But the White House and Bushies do this all the time: Human Rights Watch is great when it talks about other countries' abuses of citizens but "dangerously left-wing" when they criticize the Bush Administration's human rights policy, for example.

And, of course, this is only ONE of the many different ways Bush and Company hold themselves above both U.S. and international laws like the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, the illegal surveillance techniques, outing an active covert CIA operative (Valerie Plame) in a time of war when her services were very much needed. No president, no administration has EVER shown the complete and wholesale disregard for laws and the across-the-board sense of privilege and should-be-free-of-accountability demands Mr. Bush and his people have.

From the report:

"Citing an expansive theory of executive power that is not supported by most legal scholars, the administration has declared that the Constitution puts Bush beyond the reach of Congress in military matters and executive branch operations. . . .

"The Constitution requires the president either to veto a bill in its entirety -- giving Congress a chance to override his decision -- or to sign the bill and enforce all its components as Congress wrote them, they said.

" 'A line-item veto is not a constitutionally permissible alternative, even when the president believes that some provisions of a bill are unconstitutional. . . . A president could easily contrive a constitutional excuse to decline enforcement of any law he deplored, and transform his qualified veto into a monarch-like absolute veto,' the panel wrote."

The report states that as of July 11, Bush had raised objections to a total of 807 provisions in more than 100 laws, on the grounds that they infringed on his prerogatives.