The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), has launched an investigation challenging repeated assertions by President Bush that he need not enforce aspects of laws he deems unconstitutional. “The signing statements amount to a line-item veto, according to critics, and frustrate the legislative branch by not giving lawmakers the opportunity to override a presidential veto.”
Interestingly, the article says that a collection of Bush’s signing statements is not “readily accessible to lawmakers or the public,” but check out this remix by Coherent Babble. This site gives an index and full-text from 2001 – present scraped from whitehouse.gov and gpoaccess.gov (has anyone noticed gpoaccess’ terribly broken site search? I sent it in @ Aug, 2006 😐 ). Or if you want them farther back in time, UC Santa Barbara’s Presidency Project has all the signing statements from Hoover to G.W. Bush — as well as Public Papers, State of the Union addresses, inaugural & radio addresses, fireside chats, news conferences, executive orders, proclamations, debates, convention speeches and party platforms to boot!
Anyway, read the rest of the article:
House Panel Convenes Hearings on Bush’s ‘Signing Statements’
[Thanks Crooks and Liars!]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Latest Comments