{"id":7794,"date":"2006-06-28T09:41:07","date_gmt":"2006-06-28T13:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7794"},"modified":"2006-06-28T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2006-06-28T13:41:07","slug":"making-a-statement-prompting-a-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/making-a-statement-prompting-a-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a ‘statement’ — prompting a lawsuit?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just to follow up on yesterday’s item<\/a> about Arlen Specter’s hearings on Bush’s penchant for [tag]signing statements[\/tag], the discussion in the Judiciary Committee turned out to be unusually compelling.<\/p>\n

At one point, [tag]Bruce Fein[\/tag], an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, addressed Congress’ options in restricting a president’s ability to announce which parts of laws he’s going to ignore, and suggested<\/a> that the Senate consider legislation that would allow lawmakers to sue Bush. Specter not only described the proposal as “a very interesting idea,” he also asked Fein to help draft a bill.<\/p>\n

Apparently, at least for now, Specter is serious about this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, [tag]Arlen Specter[\/tag], said yesterday that he is “seriously considering” filing legislation to give Congress legal standing to [tag]sue[\/tag] President [tag]Bush[\/tag] over his use of signing statements to reserve the right to bypass laws.<\/p>\n

Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, made his comments after a Judiciary Committee hearing on signing statements, which are official documents that Bush has used to challenge the constitutionality of more than 750 laws when signing legislation .<\/p>\n

Bush has issued more signing statements than all previous presidents combined. But he has never vetoed a bill, depriving Congress of any chance to override his judgment. If Congress had the power to sue Bush, Specter said, the Supreme Court could determine whether the president’s objections are valid under the Constitution.<\/p>\n

There is a sense that the president has taken the signing statements far beyond the customary purviews,” Specter said at the hearing. He added that there’s a real issue here as to whether the president may, in effect, cherry-pick the provisions he likes, excluding the provisions he doesn’t like. . . . The president has the option under the Constitution to veto or not.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Experts in constitutional law seemed divided on whether this approach would pass constitutional muster — asking the federal courts to settle a dispute between Congress and the [tag]president[\/tag] is inherently tricky — but I’d like to see the Senate pursue this as an option.<\/p>\n

I still believe Specter is likely to back down from his concerns because, well, he’s Arlen Specter, but in the meantime, it’s encouraging to see the Senate at least raise serious questions about the president’s fairly blatant [tag]abuse of power[\/tag].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just to follow up on yesterday’s item about Arlen Specter’s hearings on Bush’s penchant for [tag]signing statements[\/tag], the discussion in the Judiciary Committee turned out to be unusually compelling. At one point, [tag]Bruce Fein[\/tag], an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, addressed Congress’ options in restricting a president’s ability to announce which parts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}