The Legislative and Judicial Branches are Overrated Anyway

The Bush administration’s crusade to expand executive power beyond all reckoning has continued unabated. And, on Wednesday, when President Bush signed the homeland security bill passed by Congress last week, he reserved the right, in one of his infamous signing statements, to disregard at least 36 provisions in the legislation. Among them is a new law establishing the minimum job qualifications for future FEMA directors, which would prevent the president from appointing someone based on politics not experience (i.e. Michael Brown). It's not as if the requirements are that stiff. The candidate, according to the law, must have "a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and "not less than five years of executive leadership." Seems reasonable, but apparently the president found these prerequisites too restrictive. According to the Boston Globe, the president also took aim at "a provision that empowers the FEMA director to tell Congress about the nation's emergency management needs without White House permission."

Last week, Bush challenged 16 provisions in the 2007 military budget bill. The Globe reports:
The bill bars the Pentagon from using any intelligence that was collected illegally, including information about Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable government surveillance.

In Bush's signing statement, he suggested that he alone could decide whether the Pentagon could use such information. His signing statement instructed the military to view the law in light of "the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations, and to supervise the unitary executive branch."

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service, which notes that legal claims made in some of the president’s signing statements are “generally unsupported by established legal principles,” states that “the broad and persistent nature of the claims of executive authority forwarded by President Bush appear designed to inure Congress, as well as others, to the belief that the President in fact possesses expansive and exclusive powers upon which the other branches may not intrude.” Not that we really needed a CRS report to tell us that.

Posted by Daniel Schulman on 10/06/06

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