A Republican controlled house and congress creates a poor system of checks and balances on our current president's power, especially when you have a president that thinks he is above the law. The article copied below is from Elisabeth Bumiller in does IHT.


WASHINGTON Shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 30, 2005, the White House sent out an e-mail message with an innocuous "Statement by the President" in the subject line. As might be expected of a seemingly routine announcement released in the dead time before New Year's weekend, almost no one paid attention.

But last week, Washington opened its eyes. President George W. Bush's quiet little statement not only set off fireworks at the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Judge Samuel Alito Jr., but also has ignited a new debate about the Bush administration's drive to expand the powers of the president.

To start at the beginning, Congress late last year passed what became known as the torture amendment, sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Bush at first opposed the amendment, but gave in when it became clear that it had overwhelming support from both parties on Capitol Hill.

The president then invited McCain, his old political nemesis, to the Oval Office to announce that he agreed with him and "to make clear to the world that this government does not torture."

But on Dec. 30, after signing the legislation into law with no ceremony at his Texas ranch, Bush issued an accompanying "signing statement" - the 8 p.m. e-mail - that Democrats and some Republicans say asserted that he could ignore the law if he wished.

Specifically, the statement said that the administration would interpret the amendment "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on judicial power."

McCain issued a strong statement rejecting Bush's assertion, even as the White House has repeatedly declined to say what the president meant. But Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, had no doubts and told Alito at the hearings that Bush had in essence stated that "whatever the law of the land might be, whatever Congress might have written, the executive branch has the right to authorize torture without fear of judicial review."

Alito was not just an interested observer at a hearing. In 1986, as a lawyer in the Reagan administration's Justice Department, he had helped Edwin Meese 3rd, then attorney general, develop a new theory that signing statements could be used to advance the president's interpretation of legislation.

Before then, the statements had been largely triumphal proclamations. Alito wrote that the new signing statements would "increase the power of the executive to shape the law" even as they created resentment in Congress.

At his hearings, Alito distanced himself from the memo, calling it the work of a government employee, and sidestepped questions about his current view on the statements. At this point, their legality is largely untested.

But one thing is clear: Bush has issued more than 100 of them, which scholars believe may be more than any other president. (Signing statements have been around since at least the administration of Andrew Jackson.) More significant, scholars say, Bush has greatly expanded the scope and character of the signing statement, even from the time of the Reagan administration.

"The whole history of American government is one of trying to figure out what executive power actually is, so here is the president saying, 'Well, it's my job to tell you what that power is,"' said Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College and the author of "The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power After Watergate."

Scholars say that many of Bush's most significant signing statements have been attached to national security and intelligence legislation and that he frequently uses them to assert that the administration regards requirements to turn over information as purely advisory.

For example, in signing the legislation that created the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said that while the law established "new requirements for the executive branch to disclose sensitive information," he would interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to withhold information" for national security.

As the members of the Sept. 11 commission soon learned, they had a difficult time obtaining information from the White House.

"Now, we can't prove that the reason the administration held back the information was because of the signing statement, but it announced its intentions quite clearly," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University and the author of "By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action."

Bush also used a signing statement, in November 2003 to assert that an inspector general created for oversight of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led administration that governed Iraq, should "refrain" from audits or investigations into matters of intelligence or counterintelligence.

In December 2004, Bush used a signing statement to say that in the act that created the new post of national intelligence director, he considered "advisory" those provisions setting forth how - and from whom - he received intelligence information.

Or as Rudalevige put it, "The president is basically saying that those structural changes are nice, but I don't have to listen to anybody in particular."