Laurence Tribe on Signing Statements [View All]

[kpete]

kpete: this is way over my head - need help with translation

Sunday, August 06, 2006
Larry Tribe on the ABA Signing Statements Report

What is new and distressing in the current situation isn't primarily the frequency with which President Bush, in the course of signing rather than vetoing congressional enactments, says something about his equivocal intentions, or even his defiant views, in connection with their future enforcement or non-enforcement. Rather, what is new and distressing is the bizarre, frighteningly self-serving, and constitutionally reckless character of those views -- and the suspicion that this President either intends actually to act on them with some regularity, often in a manner that won't be publicly visible at the time, or intends them as declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches -- declarations that he hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/08/larry-tribe-on-aba-signing-statements.html