Bush Protests with a Pen
President Bush has his own way of protesting. When a bill he doesn’t like arrives on his desk for signature, he signs it and then adds a statement about why he’ll ignore the law.
This story is about his most recent signing statement.
President Bush this week asserted that he has the executive authority to disobey a new law in which Congress has set minimum qualifications for future heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Congress passed the law last week as a response to FEMA’s poor handling of Hurricane Katrina. The agency’s slow response to flood victims exposed the fact that Michael Brown, Bush’s choice to lead the agency, had been a politically connected hire with no prior experience in emergency management.
To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency’s director in last week’s homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has “a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management” and “not less than five years of executive leadership.”
Bush signed the homeland-security bill on Wednesday morning. Then, hours later, he issued a signing statement saying he could ignore the new restrictions. Bush maintains that under his interpretation of the Constitution, the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions.
The law, Bush wrote, “purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.”
Near the end of the article you’ll find:
In all, Bush has challenged more than 800 laws enacted since he took office, most of which he said intruded on his constitutional powers as president and commander in chief. By contrast, all previous presidents challenged a combined total of about 600 laws.
At the same time, Bush has virtually abandoned his veto power, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Bush has vetoed just one bill since taking office, the fewest of any president since the 19th century.
Earlier this year, the American Bar Association declared that Bush’s use of signing statements was “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.”
