Bush: Constitutional Scholar

This isn’t really news any more, but it’s still worth mentioning.

Presidents occasionally write a “signing statement” when they sign a bill into law. The gist might be something along the lines of, “the law is ok, but there are parts of it that I don’t think are Constitutional, and therefore I reserve the right to not obey those parts.”

Importantly, it doesn’t mean that the president definitely won’t obey the law, but it does mean that he believes he has the Constitutional right not to. Whether, and how often, that belief translates into actually breaking the law is anyone’s guess.

Bill Clinton, in his eight years in office, signed about 140 of those statements.

It’s kind of the wrong way to go about it, isn’t it? Seems to me that if something’s wrong with the bill, you veto it, or fight about it. You don’t sign it into law, with an asterisk saying that you may only follow part of it.

But I don’t know. Since Reagan, that’s apparently been an accepted part of the president’s arsenal. Bush Sr. did it 232 times in his four years. That’s a much higher rate than Clinton’s, and raises the old eyebrows a bit, but it’s still small-fry compared to the current president.

Bush, the current president, has written (or at least signed) 750 of these babies in about 6 years in office. That’s more than every other president combined. And this is with a congress that’s dominated by his own party!

What’s going on? Is this defensible at all? 750 laws that Bush may not bother to follow? Has the Republican Congress really passed 750 unconstitutional laws, or has the Executive branch decided to not even pretend to play by the rules? How can this happen 750 times?

[This was originally reported in the Boston Globe, but you can see the article without registering here.]