Signing Statements
Obama is going to be issuing signing statements. Probably hundreds of them. That’s to be expected. James Monroe was the first president to issue signing statements. Clinton issued 381 of them.
A lot of people feel misled by Obama on this, but in fairness to Obama, he always indicated that he would continue to use signing statements, unlike McCain, who pledged to never use them:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain (R-Ariz.) made an arresting claim on the campaign trail last week: If elected president, he would issue no signing statements reserving the right to disregard parts of laws passed by Congress.
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All three of the leading presidential contenders have suggested they would take a different approach than Bush: What’s striking is that McCain appears perhaps even more radical than his Democratic rivals in adopting a seemingly ironclad refusal to issue signing statements. If he truly were to follow that approach, it would represent a sharp break in presidential practice, according to lawyers on both sides of the ideological divide.
Responding to a questionnaire late last year by the Boston Globe, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) made clear their view that Bush has gone too far in issuing signing statements — but that there are circumstances in which such statements are necessary.
The voters had choice last year and, on this issue, they voted against Change. No one can really claim they were misled.
Southpol continues:
The issue is whether Obama will, like his predecessor, turn out to have surrounded himself with legal counselors whose zeal for the protection of executive power trumps nearly every other consideration it meets.
It’s worth noting that Obama issued the signing statement in question precisely for the purpose of protecting Executive Power from legislative encroachment. There are all kinds of reasons one could issue a signing statement: the President could feel a law encroaches on civil liberties; he might think it expands government power beyond its constitutional limits; he could object to an improper usurpation of judicial power. I suspect that Obama will never use the signing statement for any of these reasons, though, and that he’ll only use it to expand or protect his own Executive Power. And that is very Bushlike. Still, it’s too early to pass judgment. As Southpol rightly concludes:
We should continue to keep an eye on this, but I believe a larger sample size might be in order before we call him Bush 3.
