Editorial: Ominous sign / The president's growing disregard for the law

Friday, January 20, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

President Bush's latest tool for disrespecting the Constitution, Congress and the American people, used more than a hundred times so far, is the presidential signing statement.

That statement is normally a few words that a president says when he signs a bill passed by Congress. In the past it was an occasion for the president to congratulate legislators who had been particularly active in passing the bill and to praise the new legislation generously, even if he himself had been unsympathetic to it.

There is no mention of the statement in the Constitution, nor does it have any role in how laws are passed and put into effect.

Yet Mr. Bush has taken the presidential signing statement as another means of asserting his will over and above the country's laws, whatever they may say. In effect, he is trying to establish that whatever he says when he signs the bill overrides whatever the legislation itself may stipulate. Historians and presidential scholars, among others, find it alarming.

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