Following up on an item from yesterday, the GAO reported that in a sampling of the president’s signing statements, “the Bush Administration failed to execute the law as instructed in over 30 percent of the cases.” We probably shouldn’t breeze by this point too quickly — Congress passed a bill, Bush signed the bill into law, and then, in several instances, after the president issued signing statements, the Bush administration decided not to do when the law mandated.
What kind of law-breaking are we talking about here? Well, in one instance, the law required the Defense Department to prepare a report on how Iraq war funding would be spent in its 2007 budget request. The administration then ignored the requirement. In another instance, the law required Customs and Border patrol to relocate its checkpoints in the Tucson area every seven days, in order to improve patrol effectiveness. The Bush gang took the law as a suggestion and ignored this, too.
In all, the GAO found six specific instances in which executive-branch agencies disobeyed the law after the president issued signing statements explaining Bush’s intention to ignore the law.
But the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer on this issue, added an important point: the GAO’s investigation doesn’t include the big stuff.
None of the laws the GAO investigated included the president’s most controversial claims involving national security, such as his assertion that he can set aside a torture ban and new oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act because he is the commander in chief. Such material is classified.
This matters quite a bit. Bush has used signing statements to challenge more than 1,100 sections of legislation he’s signed into law — more than every other president in U.S. history combined — but as Luke O’Brien noted, this includes “a federal ban on torture, a request for more information about the use of the USA Patriot Act, [and] a requirement that authorities obtain judicial warrants to open U.S. mail.”
The GAO didn’t — indeed, couldn’t — look into any of this. It obviously limits the scope of what we can learn about the administration’s disregard for the rule of law.
As for the big picture, Savage got a WH comment.
Tony Fratto , a White House spokesman, defended Bush’s use of signing statements and his expansive view of the president’s constitutional powers.
“We are executing the law as we believe we are empowered to do so,” Fratto said. “The signing statements certainly do and should have an impact. They are real.”
Their realness was never at issue; the question is about whether the administration has the ability to sign bills into law and then ignore parts of the law it doesn’t like. Fratto said, “We are executing the law as we believe we are empowered to do so,” but at the risk of sounding picky, presidential administrations are supposed to say, “We are executing the law” — without any additional phrasing. The Bush gang, to my dismay, apparently has its own version of the Constitution.
Erik Ablin , a Justice Department spokesman, said, “We reject allegations that the administration is ignoring or selectively following the law.”
Officials can reject any allegation they wish, but the facts speak for themselves.