Signing Statements
Dennis Loo, World Can’t Wait Steering Committee
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Signing Statements
Since taking office, Bush has issued hundreds of signing statements
that negate the laws he is signing – far more than all of the prior
presidents combined. In these signing statements he declares that he is
not subject to Congress or the judiciary. In his first term alone, he
issued twenty-five of these per year. (For more on this, see Barbara
Bowley’s Chapter Nine (“The Campaign for Unfettered Power: Executive
Supremacy, Secrecy and Surveillance”) in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney.)
After the 2006 mid-term elections he slowed down for a bit, but as it
became clear that Congress would not refuse him anything, he resumed
his aggressive assertions of unfettered executive power.
When
I speak to audiences about Bush and Cheney’s White House, I frequently
make the point that as bad as you may think they are, when you look
more closely and thoroughly at what they have been doing, you learn
that they are much, much worse than you thought. The truth is shocking.
Even those who have
been following what’s going on continue to be “shocked and awed” by it.
Indeed, the monstrousness of it makes it actually harder in some
important ways for people in this country to react to because it is so
out of keeping with what they are used to thinking about their
government.
Even among those who know a great deal of history,
and who are therefore not under many illusions about this government,
are those who have a hard time understanding how momentous the steps
being taken are. Many of them tend to think that this is just more of
the same and that the fight to drive Bush and Cheney from office
obscures the fundamental character of U.S. imperialism. They are,
therefore, standing aside from the impeachment fight.
They
fail to see that Bush and Cheney are the cutting edge of a rupture from
past norms and that the legalization of torture, the stripping away of
due process rights, the ubiquitous spying, the overt assertions that
the executive is accountable to no one – not Congress, not the
judiciary, not international courts, not the people – are the elements
of a fascist state. If you sit by and let what Bush and Cheney are
doing happen and you don’t fight it and don’t do everything you can to
drive them from office, then you are allowing these new steps to become
the new normal. That would be a fatal mistake.
The people who
are now being tortured and indefinitely detained are the most
vulnerable – Muslims among them – and the academics who they’ve fired
and threatened include the ones who’ve taken the most out there stances
(such as Ward Churchill). The people who are not yet being rounded up
and brutalized are, in all too many numbers, oblivious to the fate of
these. Naomi Wolf in her new book The End of America quotes a friend of hers who is otherwise compassionate as saying that “That’s not my issue.”
The
refusal to stand up for those being killed, tortured, brutalized and
fired is not only indefensible morally, but short-sighted. If a
government can get away with doing terrible things to the most
vulnerable, their next steps will be – and are – to progressively go
after the less marginal: the people who now think that it’s permissible
for the executive to trample upon civil liberties and civil rights in
the name of “national security.”
Note
in the following article that Hillary, Obama, and Romney have publicly
declared that if elected they too will use signing statements.
McCain has said he will not, but then, after the 2005 McCain Amendment
that prohibited torturing detainees was passed by Congress and Bush
signed it using a signing statement stating that he would not abide by
it, McCain said nothing. He said nothing even though Bush had just
obliterated the meaning of the McCain Amendment. He said nothing
because he wanted to be president himself.