House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is threatening to take President Bush to court if he issues a signing statement as a way of sidestepping a carefully crafted compromise Iraq war spending bill. Pelosi recently told a group of liberal bloggers, “We can take the president to court” if he issues a signing statement, according to Kid Oakland, a blogger who covered Pelosi’s remarks for the liberal website dailykos.com. “The president has made excessive use of signing statements and Congress is considering ways to respond to this executive-branch overreaching,” a spokesman for Pelosi, Nadeam Elshami, said. “Whether through the oversight or appropriations process or by enacting new legislation, the Democratic Congress will challenge the president’s non-enforcement of the laws.”
| They'd like nothing better than a drawn-out courtroom drama that would drain Bush without having the Dhimmicrats take responsibility for anything. |
| Which seemed pretty simple. A president is allowed to say why he's vetoing a bill. He's also allowed to state, when signing a bill, what he thinks it means and how he's going to enforce it. |
| Again, without actually taking responsibility for the war, since they understand that most Americans don't want a 'cut and run' policy, and they understand that if a cut and run results in an Iraqi bloodbath and a new middle eastern war, the Dhimmis will be blamed for the next half-century. |
| A rescisson would be vetoed, and the Dhimmis would be back where they are today. They gave the President the power to conduct the war in 2002, and they're stuck unless they cut off the funding. That leaves them the fingerprint problem again. Funny they don't suggest the obvious solution in public. |
In order to hear an argument, a federal court would have to grant what is known as “standing,” meaning that lawmakers would have to show that Bush is willfully ignoring a bill Congress passed and that he signed into law. The House would have to demonstrate what is called “injury in fact.” A court might accept the case if “it is clear that the legislature has exhausted its ability to do anything more,” a former general counsel to the House of Representatives, Stanley Brand, said.
| Not likely: the courts traditionally have been reluctant to referee political spats between the Congress and the President, and getting in the middle of whether or not to fight or end a war is a place no Supreme Court wants to be. |
A law professor at Georgetown Law Center, Nicholas Rosenkranz, said Bush is likely to express his view on the constitutionality of the next supplemental in writing. Whether Bush has leeway to treat any provision of the supplemental as advisory, however, depends on the wording Congress chooses, Rosenkranz added.
Bruce Fein, who was a Justice Department official under President Reagan, said Democrats seeking to challenge a signing statement would have to try to give themselves standing before filing a lawsuit. “You’d need an authorizing resolution in the House and Senate … to seek a declaratory judgment from the federal district court that the president, by issuing a signing statement, is denying Congress’s obligation to [hold a veto override vote],” Fein said.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) introduced legislation to that end last year, but the idea of a lawsuit has yet to gain traction in Congress.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that “the odds would be good” for a signing statement on the next supplemental, considering that Bush has in the past shown a predilection for excusing his administration from contentious bills. But Levin did not offer any clues as to how Democratic leaders would counter Bush.