No Need to Veto

[Via Kos]

The President has upheld a surprising statistic in Presidential history: he has never vetoed a law. When McCain's anti-torture amendments began to kick up steam, Cheney attempted to strongarm friendlies into accepting their torture exceptions, while Bush vowed to pull out the veto stamp- which would be a first. Finding this political situation untenable in the face of a 90-9 vote denouncing torture, The Administration conceded, and instead offered a "signing statement" which, essentially, said that they could just disobey the bill if they wanted to anyway.

Turns out that not only was this a controversial "signing statement," but it brought to the nation's attention that Bush has used this tactic over 500 times; behaving more like a schoolchild who makes a promise with his fingers crossed behind his back:

I’ve speculated on a few occasions that the White House has had a tacit agreement with Congress: So long as Congress doesn’t interfere with the administration, the president won’t interfere with the drunken-sailor pork bender that distinguishes this Republican Congress from all others. The thesis was based on Bush’s historic reluctance to veto a bill, or even to threaten one; he’s the only president since James Garfield to go an entire term without vetoing a bill, and Garfield was only in office a few months before he was shot.

Apparently, though, the explanation is much simpler. Bush doesn’t veto bills because in his view, he doesn’t have to; he can simply ignore the ones he doesn’t like.

The administration have made that argument explicit, but only in terms of the president’s capacity as “commander in chief” during an endless war, as with the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping, the decisions to ignore various Geneva Conventions and the selective suspension of habeas corpus. According to the Hutcheson story, though, it isn’t only legislation dealing with national security issues that the White House asserts the right to ignore.

In 2003, lawmakers tried to get a handle on Bush’s use of signing statements by passing a Justice Department spending bill that required the department to inform Congress whenever the administration decided to ignore a legislative provision on constitutional grounds.
Bush signed the bill, but issued a statement asserting his right to ignore the notification requirement.

I have a request in to the White House for a list of the legislation to which the president has appended bill-signing statements, along with the text of the statements. We’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, Hutcheson provides a bit of background on the brief but sordid history of bill-signing statements.

The roots of Bush’s approach go back to the Ford administration, when Dick Cheney, then serving as White House chief of staff, chafed at legislative limits placed on the executive branch in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and other abuses of power by President Nixon. Now the vice president and his top aide, David Addington, are taking the lead in trying to tip the balance of power away from Congress and back to the president.
[…]

Reagan adopted the strategy and used signing statements to challenge 71 legislative provisions, according to Kelley’s tally. President George H.W. Bush challenged 146 laws; President Clinton challenged 105. The current president has lodged more than 500 challenges so far.

Cheney has done an admirable job of tipping the balance of power; at the moment, the only power Congress appears to have is that of the purse, and the purse is jammed open, at least if you have a bridge in Alaska you want to sell.

Kos wonders aloud why The Administration doesn't just "dissolve" Congress, because he's effectively stating that their checks on his power structure do nothing when he issues these statements [and he always issues the statements].

But Congress is a fantastic diversionary tool for The Administration. It's much easier to keep a country unaware when they're so spectacularly distracted.