The ABA's silly complaint about signing statements

NY Times:

The American Bar Association said Sunday that President Bush was flouting the Constitution and undermining the rule of law by claiming the power to disregard selected provisions of bills that he signed.

In a comprehensive report, a bipartisan 11-member panel of the bar association said Mr. Bush had used such “signing statements” far more than his predecessors, raising constitutional objections to more than 800 provisions in more than 100 laws on the ground that they infringed on his prerogatives.

These broad assertions of presidential power amount to a “line-item veto” and improperly deprive Congress of the opportunity to override the veto, the panel said.

In signing a statutory ban on torture and other national security laws, Mr. Bush reserved the right to disregard them.

The bar association panel said the use of signing statements in this way was “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers.” From the dawn of the Republic, it said, presidents have generally understood that, in the words of George Washington, a president “must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto.”

If the president deems a bill unconstitutional, he can veto it, the panel said, but “signing statements should not be a substitute for a presidential veto.”

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They are not a veto. They are the President's interpretation of the bill which has no more weight than Congressional intent, which the Court ignores all the time, most recently on the Hamdan case. The lawyers of the ABA should be smart enough to know this. I think they are making their own "signing" statement saying they have a different interpretation of the law than the President, but the Court will ultimately decide the meaning of the statute. What the signing statements will do is give an expression of Presidential intent. If Congress has a differnt interpretation they can make that known without having to get a super majority as they would to overturn a veto.