"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
Yeah, I read things like this and am so glad that our Chief Justice is losing sleep about the constitutional crisis facing our country.
Reigning in stuff like these signing statements, while building a case for a different agenda that will increase majorities and flip the Presidency, is going to be the test of Congressional leadership now. I'll trust the Supreme Court to follow the election returns.
Is there any legal foundation for his signing statements? Or is that just another bit of "if the President does it" magical thinking?
Reigning in
Interesting slip, that.
5: yes it was. I remember learning about the divine right of kings, and wondering how anybody could have believed it. George W. Bush: making it easier to understand Tartuffe.
LB, when are you going to become a civil liberties lawyer? You'd kick some ass.
4: As far as I understand it, not much of one. What it is, more than anything else, is a statement of intent: "This is what I understand the law I'm signing to mean, and I plan to carry it out as if it did mean that." Or, under other circumstances: "While I'm signing this into law, I think provision X of it is unconstitutional, and wouldn't make it past a judicial challenge; I'm going to act as if provision X were void." (Clinton had a couple of signing statements in the latter category, I believe, but I'd have to look back over them to be sure.)
But the signing statement shouldn't properly affect any judge's later interpretation of the law -- the wording of the law is paramount, and the intent of Congress, where it can be ascertained, means something if the wording is ambiguous. The President's understanding of the law, particularly where it's at odds with the words of the law, shouldn't mean much of anything in a courtroom.
I swear to God--if that man doesn't try to make his horse a Senator before the end of his term, I will be very surprised. But I wonder sometimes if Bush even believes he has the powers he claims. Statements like these almost seem like Presidential trolling, for want of a better phrase.
I've got no civil rights experience (I don't actually think that should be a problem -- new substantive areas of law aren't hard to get acclimated to. But it means something job hunting) and a mortgage which imposes constraints on what I need to get paid. But I do look wistfully at the ACLU site for job listings occasionally.
9: Bush is terrified of horses. He'd have to name his Scottish Terrier.
Also, did everyone see this when it came out?
A wonderful note to return to the country on --- I thought I couldn't be more frustrated or annoyed after having severe travel snafu's.... but all it took was a reminder that he (they) keep doing shit like this. Add depressed to the list.
This really pisses me off. I have a deep, abiding, and totally dorky love for the US Postal Service. Mail is fucking sacrosanct.
11: Even better. His new Senator will be housetrained.
Seriously, what the hell, people? Is there any sense that someone other than us is outraged about this?
It's rocketing around the net, mrh. Give it a while. Also, I suspect that the USPS employees will have summat to say on it.
I just realized that the New York Daily News scooped this. Wow.
Weren't they also the ones with Giuliani's leaked playbook? They've had a very good 2007 so far.
I always think of them as less popular than the Post and less free than AM New York, but I guess they do have a few journalists on staff.
17: It gives me a certain amount of pleasure blogging stories that I know about because I saw the headline on a physical newsstand. Kudos to the Daily News.
19: The father of one of Sally's school friends is a columnist, and he's very good on NY stories.
10- you could always sell your house and move into someplace smaller. In India they pack families of 10 into a single room.
And while you may have any direct experience in civil-liberties work, you do have a lot of published scholarship in the field. (Blog posts.) Just mention in the cover letter that you are Lizardbreath, and include the url.
Your job satisfaction would improve markedly, I suspect.
22 - "may have" s/b "may not have".
Welcome back, Soub. Are you still game for a Tiny Texas Meet-up? Along with anyone else in our neck of the woods?
We could go egg the Crawford Ranch.
And Glenn Reynolds has linked to you, so that's like being published in JAMA.
24: Thanks. My `vacation' ended up being more a death by a thousand cuts variant than a worse xmas evah type.
The travel alone involved two cancelled flights, one unexpected 8 hour layover, one lost bag requiring emergency shopping while most stores were closed, one 3 1/2 hour wait for check in and immigration that culminated in missing a flight by 15 minutes --- and $200 of last minute hotel etc. because immigration isn't the airlines fault.... all this in three flights.
yeesh, I'm a whinging bastard sometimes, aren't I?
So i'm glad to be home. Girlfriend-of-soubz has followed me home to stay for a while so we need a little settling in time plus arriving late has piled work on for this week. I guess ease of tiny texas meetups will depend somewhat on location. We have Austin and Houston represented so far, right? Anyone other locales?
Soub has only told us his side of the story.
That's true. If we asked the airplanes we'd get a whole different perspective.
I heard a comedian once say, "Everything depends on your perspective. If you run the tape backwards, it looks like the cops are picking Rodney King up and sending him on his way."
As per 24, locales-wise, I think if we knew how many people were interested, we could find time that accomodates most everyone.
This is the same man who thought that the Authorization to Use Military Force simultaneously put us in a state enough like war to warrant basically suspending the constitution, but enough unlike war to exempt us from our treaty obligations. It seems clear to me that Congress did not intend to suspend the consitution and all our obligations under international law when they passed the AUMF. After that kind of radical claim, all the rest of these signing statements seem frankly petty. You've claimed absolute power -- don't lower yourself by going into detail about what that means! Of course, asking Bush not to lower himself is like asking the sun not to set.
the Crawford Ranch.
Marcotte referred to it as Rancho Borracho, which I thought worked pretty well.
Wouldn't a Waco Meet-up be a good idea? We could tour Rancho Borracho, go to the Dr. Pepper Museum, and finish it off at the Koresh Kompound.
33: I didn't even know about the dr. pepper museum. Bonus!
27: At least I spared you the non-travel related bits...
The Dr Pepper museum sells Dr Pepper made with sugar instead of corn syrup. Surely no finer museum gift store purchase can be found in the great state of Texas.
"sugar instead of corn syrup"
And hence it is kosher for passover. Double bonus.
Could we hope that JR, upon realising that, as Chief Justice, he ain't never gonna make the Really Big Bucks, decides to toss it all in the bin [preferably after W leaves office and Obama is sworn in] to become the new CEO of Home Depot, where they kiss you off with a $210 million g'bye package, even tho' the shares have tumbled during your reign, partially because you paid yourself hundreds of millions in salary? After all, he's quite young; being able to buy a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 [price tag: $1,192,057] now would be more fun than when he was 80 and couldn't enjoy the nubile young women who would be attracted to such shows of wealth.
Tell me what 'rights' the Iraqis in the videos below (see llink) have? Living in an dictatorship sucks, doesn't it?
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2006/12/winning-hearts-and-minds-part-three.html
And hence it is kosher for passover. Double bonus.
And hence it can be used in cooking (I know of at least one cake recipe that calls for Dr. Pepper and I'm sure there's been a ham glaze or two). Hat trick.
I suspect that a ham glazed with Dr. Pepper is not kosher, for passover or otherwise.
33: You mean the Dr. Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute.
Does the sugar in the soda offset the libertarians? Tough call.
40: Well, so much for the Dr. Pepper Cheesy-Ham-'N-BBQ-Bacon Surprise I was going to take to Passover.
im in the white house, ignorin ur l4wz...
2: A belated thanks for that link. I never read Slate anymore. WHY hasn't one of Lithwick's other paying gigs morphed into something full-time for her? She deserves a much better platform.
I waiting for him to attach a signing statement to a bill reauthorizing some small unit of the USDA which says that he interprets the bill as giving him the right to nuke Tehran and make the penguin the national bird.
The country won't stand for the penguin.
That's only because they are pro-terrorism.
Not sure if everyone has seen these videos of the US military in Iraq or not, but they are pretty amazing: Hopefully our 'surge' will not include too many of these types...
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2006/12/winning-hearts-and-minds-part-three.html
Dude, Minor-Ripper, stop spamming every political blog. That's only going to gain you ill-will, not clicks.
Doubt he's hanging around to see if anyone has comments on his AMAZING NEW STOCK TIP ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION CURE IRAQ VIDEO, JM. There must be eight or nine blogs he hasn't posted on today.
Well, he's posted twice on this thread already. If he comes back again, he might see some of the annoyance he deserves.
Does that sort of comment-spamming work? I'll admit that I still occasionally enjoy reading BagNewsNotes, which I discovered by clicking on one of its ubiquitous blogads out of exasperation. That was back before I downloaded Adblock.
50: Evangelicals love penguins.
55: Since the outlay required for spamming is negligible, it's worth doing even if it only works an extremely small percentage of the time. This is one example of how market forces do not fix all problems.
The last time I saw any research on this (which was probably four or five years ago), the click-through rate on spam was around 2%.
This meant it would never, ever die, because at the time that was twice the click-through rate on banner ads.
Evangelicals love penguins.
Except the gay penguins.
