Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vowed yesterday that he will “hold an oversight hearing into President Bush’s assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years.” Specter accused the White House of “‘very blatant encroachment’ on congressional authority.”

”There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here,” Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ”What’s the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn’t like?”

Specter said he plans to hold the hearing in June. He said he intends to call administration officials to explain and defend the president’s claims of authority, as well to invite constitutional scholars to testify on whether Bush has overstepped the boundaries of his power.

The senator emphasized that his goal is ”to bring some light on the subject.” Legal scholars say that, when confronted by a president encroaching on their power, Congress’s options are limited. Lawmakers can call for hearings or cut the funds of a targeted program to apply political pressure, or take the more politically charged steps of censure or impeachment.

Specter’s announcement followed the report in the Sunday Boston Globe (see Ron’s post here) that “Bush has quietly asserted the authority to ignore provisions in 750 bills he has signed — about 1 in 10.” There are examples of Bush’s signing statements here.

During the past five years, Bush has stated that he “can defy any statute that conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution, ” citing his role as head of the executive branch, commander in chief, or more aptly put, DICTATOR, to justify the exemptions.

The statutes that Bush has asserted the right to override include numerous rules and regulations for the military, job protections for whistle-blowers who tell Congress about possible government wrongdoing, affirmative action requirements, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Bush made the claims in ‘’signing statements,” official documents in which a president lays out his interpretation of a bill for the executive branch, creating guidelines to follow when it implements the law. The statements are filed without fanfare in the federal record, often following ceremonies in which the president made no mention of the objections he was about to raise in the bill, even as he signed it into law.

Legal scholars assert that the “frequency and breadth of Bush’s use of that power are unprecedented.”

Specter appears to be more than a bit miffed about Bush’s role as the “decider” and the fact that he takes a ‘’statute, which Congress has passed, and then the signing statements negate that statute,” Specter said. ”And there are more and more of them coming. If the president doesn’t like something, he puts a signing statement on it.”

Specter added: ”He put a signing statement on the Patriot Act. He put a signing statement on the torture issue. It’s a very blatant encroachment on [Congress's constitutional] powers. If he doesn’t like the bill, let him veto it.”

Specter’s announcement came yesterday during a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on FBI oversight (see earlier posts here and here).

Judiciary committee member, Senator Russ Feingold, got into the mix as well yesterday, questioning Bush’s “assertions that he has the authority to give himself an exemption from certain laws.” In March, Feingold “called for censure of George Bush for the NSA warrantless wiretaps.”

Feingold also said yesterday that “Bush’s legal claims have cast a cloud over a host of rules and restrictions that Congress has passed, using its constitutional authority to regulate the executive branch of government.”

”How can we know whether the government will comply with the new laws that we passed?” Feingold said.

Specter said “challenging Bush’s contention that he can ignore laws written by Congress should be a matter of institutional pride for lawmakers.”

He also connected Bush’s defiance of laws to several Supreme Court decisions in which the justices ruled that Congress had not done enough research to justify a law.

”We’re undergoing a tsunami here with the flood coming from the executive branch on one side and the judicial branch on the other,” Specter said. ”There may as well soon not be a Congress. . . . And I think that most members don’t understand what’s happening.”

How this will play out in the hearing slated for June remains to be seen.

Filed under: Democrats, In The News, Politics, Republicans, Senate | Get Permalink or trackback |