Well, this is very interesting:
The House rebuked President Obama for trying to ignore restrictions to international aid payments, voting overwhelmingly for an amendment forcing the administration to abide by its constraints.
House members approved an amendment by a 429-2 vote to have the Obama administration pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and require a Treasury Department report on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) activities. The amendment to a 2010 funding bill for the State Department and foreign operations was proposed by Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), but it received broad bipartisan support.
The conditions on World Bank and IMF funding were part of the $106 billion war supplemental bill that was passed last month. Obama, in a statement made as he signed the bill, said that he would ignore the conditions.
They would “interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the Congress prior to such negotiations or discussions,” Obama said in the signing statement.
I don’t remember the Republicans in Congress showing much concern about George W. Bush’s signing statements. But now that a Democrat is in office they move in a bloc to cut off any Treasury Department spending that is not in compliance with the law as they wrote it. I suppose they are to be commended for learning their lesson. Hah!
The use of signing statements isn’t new and it didn’t begin with Dubya. Dubya just took the practice to an entirely higher level. President Obama has legitimate concerns about the impact of this bill’s language. In his signing statement Obama wasn’t very specific, but he was objecting to language that would mandate a certain policy towards the World Bank and that would dictate that the World Bank carry out certain reporting tasks. The policy goals are laudable: more labor friendly scoring, and more transparency. But the World Bank isn’t the United States Bank, even if we’ve always treated it that way. It’s not clear that Congress can dictate policy towards an entity like the World Bank even if they are funding it. They are treating it more as a U.S. property than a recipient of foreign aid.
The real question is whether or not Obama should have simply vetoed the War Supplemental funding because of this particular language. The Courts are loathe to adjudicate disputes like this, but would probably rule for the president if forced to take one side or the other. Yet, I approve of the policy goals in the bill and I also like seeing Congress flex its muscles and assert its authority. I just wonder why this only happens to Democratic presidents.
Update [2009-7-10 11:40:30 by BooMan]: Having carefully reviewed the offending language, I am not sure how the Supreme Court would rule. The core dispute would seem to be whether Congress has the power to compel the Secretary of Treasury to set their policy and issue orders to the United States Executive Directors serving at the World Bank and IMF, or if the president retains that power.
Relevant language (Sec.1110-1112 of title XI)
(Sec.1403-1404 of Title XIV)
Thanks for actually reading and sharing the text. I have no patience for those who opine on legislative matters without having even read the text.
Is this a rhetorical “I just wonder” or is it an honest “I just wonder”?
If it’s an honest question, it has a pretty easy answer. At this point Republicans have become partisan beasts – it’s all about partisan gamesmanship. If it serves a partisan purpose they’ll jump on it. Democrats, OTOH, seem to think that partisanship expressed by Democrats is a bad thing for their re-election – if it smells even vaguely of partisanship they shy away from it like a disease.
So when a Republican president is in power Republicans jump to his defense about everything because that’s what they do. When a Democratic president is in power Republican jump on his every action because that’s what they do.
Meanwhile when a Republican president is in power Democrats try to avoid partisanship and seek compromises because that’s what they do. And when a Democratic president is in power that’s when it’s time to stand up against the Democratic president and strike “bipartisan” compromises with the Republicans, because that’s what they do.
It’s a really simple, horribly disfunctional dynamic for a two-party system. But it’s how the game is played. That’s why Bill Clinton was pretty much the best Republican president the US has had since Eisenhower, though I’m guessing that if Obama can keep his pants on for the next 8 years he might just displace Clinton as the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Time will tell, I suppose.
As an objective description of reality, you do very well here. But you don’t get down a layer into underlying causes of this dynamic.
The Republicans operate in a zone and they are very protective of that zone. After Eisenhower accepted the New Deal, the zone shifted dramatically to the left. It changed what the two parties were fighting over. The terrain was different. The same thing happened when Nixon largely accepted the Great Society.
The GOP’s one effort at roll-back, the Reagan Revolution, had a nice run with limited results. Mainly, they prevented any more progressive leaps for a thirty year period. They kept the terrain where it was and made the argument about keeping the status quo or rolling it back. It was a fight on their terrain.
Universal health care would be another progressive leap, and they will do anything to stop it (as they did in 1993). Their ideological and policy goal is to keep the ground from shifting away from them.
The Democrats have no investment in the status quo on most issues. Their reason for being is to use government to solve problems. With the Republicans in control, that can be a game of attaining the least-bad outcome, but it still requires legislative engagement. The Democrats have no interest in fighting the good fight only to lose everything. But there is an even more critical dynamic. Almost nothing large and meaningful can pass through Congress without bipartisan support. If your goal is to prevent large and meaningful reforms, then bipartisanship is of little use to you. But if you want to pass a major bill, you have to reach out. We’re learning this is true even when you have large majorities and a theoretically filibuster-proof Senate. How much more true has it been since 1980 when we had smaller majorities or were in the minority?
Signing statements have no Constitutional legitimacy, period. Of course, on the sliding scale of unconstitutional policies the Obama administration has seen fit to continue, I can’t get too excited about this one. I’m still too steamed (and frightened and ashamed) by the whole indefinite detention after acquittal business. I’ll worry about signing statements when we get the Bill of Rights back.
We may soon find out if they have any constitutional legitimacy.
Someone needs to challenge the practice.
But here’s the thing to remember. If a piece of legislation impinges on the proper authorities of the executive branch, it can be unconstitutional even if the president signs it into law. The same is true if it violates the Constitution in ways that have no bearing on the powers of the executive branch. But, in cases where the executive branch’s powers have been implicated, someone needs to challenge the law for there to be a ruling.
The signing statement itself, has no legal bearing. But it is a signal that the executive feels like their rights have been impacted unconstitutionally. Whether that is truly the case or not depends entirely on the situation.
The Courts seek, whenever possible, to avoid settling such disputes and usually make every effort to compel Congress and the administration to resolve their differences without recourse to the Court.
The practice of signing statements is basically the administration putting the onus on Congress to go to the Courts. If they do, and they win, then that settles the matter. But it allows the president to ignore aspects of the law in the absence of such a ruling. In other words, if they lose the case they’ll abide by the law but they won’t admit to violating it prior to the ruling because it was a matter of legal dispute, not a flat violation of law.
As a practical matter, this gives the government more flexibility. They can pass and sign laws that contain matters of dispute on Constitutional matters rather than getting tied in knots everytime there is some minor disagreement in an otherwise vital bill.
But it is certainly open to abuse. In this case, they should probably get together and hash out a compromise to resolve their differences.
True, but deciding whether something is constitutional or not is not the executive branch’s purview; that is the exclusive domain of the judicial branch. If the president wants to challenge the constitutionality of the law, the executive branch has an abundance of lawyers available to take the issue to the courts. (I don’t know whether the executive branch invariably has standing to do so in every case, but it arguably should.)
Would that clog up the courts? Sure, if the president decided to challenge each and every bill he disagreed with. The impracticality of doing so should serve as a natural check on excesses. As I interpret the intentions of the Framers, the president is not supposed to be “shaping legislation” beyond his ability to appeal to the people and to members of Congress. The president’s job is to execute the laws passed by the legislature. He may, of course, veto bills up to a certain point, but the ability of Congress to override vetoes only underscores the intention of the Framers that the legislature was to be the pre-eminent branch of the government.
Is Congress a perfect guardian of the Constitution? Assuredly not, which is why we have the courts. But its very fractiousness limits both the severity and the rapidity of its misdeeds. The Presidency, on the other hand, has an inherent focus and fleetness that makes it much less trustworthy by nature, as the Framers foresaw when they created a deliberately weak chief executive.
If I had to choose the number one deficiency of our system of government, it is that despite the extensive efforts of the Framers, the executive branch has continually grown more and more powerful over time, and Americans have nearly completely forgotten that the Revolution sought not just to abolish unelected leaders, but also rule by fiat, regardless of its source. And signing statements, as practiced in recent years, are both a form of rule by fiat and a dereliction of the president’s constitutional duties.
Finally, in this as in so many other areas, the recent abuse of the system — unless we wish to see it establish precedent — must be repudiated in the strongest terms possible. Unfortunately, as in those other, arguably more important areas, this president seems unlikely to approach the task of constitutional restoration with the diligence and energy it demands.
It is certainly arguable that a president should not sign a bill that has anything in it that he feels is unconstitutional.
But, let’s say that the president signs it anyway and then goes to the courts to try to strike the offending language? That’s not a pretty picture. It’s better to go right back to congress and ask them to fix the problem. I’d argue that this would be a better way. A signing statement, in this scenario, would be official notice to Congress that they need to work out some compromise.
The alternative, in the absence of a line-item veto, is to really gum up the works.
What’s not acceptable is to leave a dispute unresolved with the administration in a position of flouting the law as it is written.
On a related note, did you hear whether Congress pushed back against Obama on the issue of broadening the CIA briefings beyond the gang of eight?
Speaking of which – see my article today re the CIA’s long history of lying to Congress at http://www.consortiumnews.com today.