Yesterday was an unusually busy news day, but the White House signing statement expanding the president’s authority to open Americans’ mail without a warrant sparked quite a bit of interest.<\/p>\n
For their part, the Bush gang insisted<\/a> that the expansive new powers are no big deal<\/a> and the president was not claiming any new executive authority.<\/p>\n Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said the statement Mr. Bush issued in signing postal legislation was merely a restatement of existing law allowing mail to be opened without a warrant in “exigent circumstances” to protect public safety.<\/p>\n “All this is saying is that there are provisions at law for, in exigent circumstances, for such inspections,” Mr. Snow said. “It has been thus. This is not a change in the law. This is not new.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s an odd argument. If the signing statement merely restated existing law, why bother with the signing statement at all? Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, noted<\/a> the government has long been able to legally open mail believed to dangerous, but a court order is necessary to open other suspect mail, which necessarily makes the signing statement different. “The administration is playing games about warrants,” Martin said. “If they are not claiming new powers, then why did they need to issue a signing statement?”<\/p>\n Indeed, Snow’s unpersuasive arguments notwithstanding, some of the same lawmakers who approved the postal legislation that sparked the signing statement, don’t understand<\/a> why the president thinks he can pass his own laws. The Republican sponsor of a postal reform bill called on President Bush yesterday to explain why he used it to claim he can open domestic mail without a search warrant.<\/p>\n Sen. Susan Collins of Maine questioned Bush’s controversial Dec. 20 “signing statement” in which he stated if there were an emergency he wouldn’t need a warrant to open letters. The bill he signed into law that day, co-sponsored by Collins, requires search warrants for mail.<\/p>\n “It is my hope that the administration will clarify its intent with this recent statement,” said Collins, a GOP moderate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For that matter, in a follow-up piece<\/a>, the New York Daily News also noted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress in 2005 that warrantless mail searches “would be highly unusual,” and “even then you’d have to go to a judge after the fact and explain what you’ve done.” But that’s not reflected in the new signing statement at all.<\/p>\n The flap has also not gone unnoticed by the new congressional majority. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called<\/a> Bush’s signing statement a “last-minute, irregular and unauthorized reinterpretation of a duly passed law” protecting the privacy of mail users.<\/p>\n
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