June 2006 Archives

Did you know that President Bush hasn’t vetoed a single bill since taking office six years ago? How the heck does he manage that kind of congenial record with the most irritatingly partisan congress in history? I’ll tell you how: presidential singing statements.

Basically a signing statement is a brief note attached to a bill when the president signs it, which tells the congress how the Executive interprets the language of the bill. Sounds fair enough, right? Here’s an example dealing with one of my least favorite laws, The PATRIOT Act.

The law: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

The addition essential negates the law, returning authority to the Executive to do as he pleases.

Granted form presidents have also used these statements, that doesn’t make them less offensive to the idea of our republican democratic system. During the present administration they seem to deal often with alleged national security exemptions. Here’s my favorite example:

The law: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.

Signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ”as advisory in nature.”

Essentially a big screw you to the people’s elected representatives from the commander-in-chief of America’s armed forces.

Please stop writing to or calling your elected officials, they are very busy considering the very most important issues of the day an don’t have time to speak with you right now. Some of the pressing matters recently or soon to be voted on are:

• protecting the flag from the recent rash of burnings and other desecrating acts
• protecting innocent men and woman from the too-fabulous weddings of gay couples
• protecting the Pledge of Allegiance from recalcitrant schoolchildren and parents
• protecting free thinking individuals from the dangers of Internet Texas Hold’em poker
• various other unspecified “social issues” called the “The American Values Agenda”

Now here’s a list of the things that the congress considers less important, but that you still should not contact them about:

• discovering what’s broken in Iraq and helping to fix it
• providing legislation that will protect America from attachs via our seaports
• developing meaningful, consequential caps on vehicle emmisions to prevent global warming
• legitimately investigating and monitoring the president’s overreaching domestic surveillance programs
• stopping the same spy activities
• fixing the gaping budget deficit
• repairing Social Security and more importantly Medicare entitlements before they bankrupt my children’s government
• improving American primary and secondary schools
• helping the 40 million children without it to get into some form of health insurance program

He is consistently positive about the prospects for America’s contining to stand at the forefront of nations, economically, politically, and otherwise. Friedman’s column in the New York Times today is a perfect example of why I always enjoy reading what he has to say.

He describes his daughter’s graduation ceremony at a fairly large high school in Maryland. The roster of grads was very diverse:

The commencement was my daughter Natalie’s, the high school was Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md. There were some 700 kids receiving their diplomas, and as I sat there for two hours listening to each one’s name pronounced, I became both fascinated and touched by the stunning diversity — race, religion, ethnicity — of the graduating class. I knew my daughter’s school was diverse, but I had no idea it was this diverse.

He goes on to say that there may be many reasons to feel pesemistic about the future of America: the war in Iraq, fiscal irresponsibility, and waning educational success. And then he turns it around again:

But if there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese. […] It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan — the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not But they will never win the future — because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts. Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book…