The Lunch Break Blog

Stick to the Veto, Will Ya? 03/12/2009

In his first 50 days, President Obama has made many uses of the presidential practice of executive orders. While his pronouncements represent a marked change from the Bush administration and fulfill some of Obama’s campaign promises, citizens beware! Whether you like what he’s done or not, Obama, like many presidents before him, is walking a thin constitutional line. There is no explicit power given to the executive in the Constitution that allows him to make his own decrees. Similarly, our new President has also continued the practice of using signing statements to modify the meaning of bills that he signs into law. Keep in mind that Democrats heavily criticized Bush’s use of the signing statement when a bill did not fit into his ideology. Again, whether Republican or Democrat, the president is not given these powers anywhere in the Constitution. In fact, I think the framers might consider the modern obsession with executive orders and signing statements tantamount to the royal decrees made by King George III that sparked our first suspicions of tyranny in America so long ago.

Here’s what the president can do. He can direct the officers of his executive branches and clarify their roles under his administration. Cast in this light, President Obama has the right to close down Guatanamo Bay by executive order because one could argue that the Attorney General under Obama should give closer review to the enemy combatant cases coming to trial. It could also be argued that control of the military and it’s prisons are within the bounds of the President’s constitutional powers. But when Obama begins venturing into realms of specific allocations of federal money, the constitutionality of it all gets a little blurry. How can the president decide if federal funds should or should not go to embryonic stem cell research? Or decide if tax payer money should or should not be denied to doctors who refuse to carry out abortions on moral grounds? The Constitution clearly states that Congress alone has the power of the purse.

Like executive orders, signing statements carry no legal force. They simply serve as a way for a president define how he will or will not implement provisions of a law. For example, President Obama has decided that he will pass the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, but with the signing statement provision that he will now put in place new rules to control earmarks. Maybe the President views earmark spending as unconstitutional, or maybe this move is as politically motivated as any of Bush’s 152 signing statements. It seems like the current executive is engaged in political doublethink, acting as though he is sticking to his campaign promise of earmark reform while at the same time signing into law 8,500 new pet projects costing an extra $7.7 billion of spending during a time when Americans are supposed to be tightening their belts.

The president is charged to uphold the Constitution and faithful execution of the law, but these recent executive orders and the signing statement have more to do with pleasing political constituents than anything else. Even if the President had Constitutional doubts on this latest bill, how is he able to modify his enforcement of laws and challenge some on the basis of their constitutionality? Don’t we have separation of powers and a Supreme Court with the power of judicial review serving the same purpose?  Otherwise, it could be possible that the president could make his own laws, purposefully misconstrue congressional intent on others or simply refuse to enforce those he found unsuitable. In other words, he would become a de facto King. One would think that the founding fathers would have anticipated this problem and planned for it. Oh, that’s right, they did. It’s called the veto. Is the legislative process so terrible that we can’t send the occasional law back for revisions every now and then. Instead of taking the easy way out and making all kinds of exceptions, President Obama should just use his veto power if he doesn’t like a bill on his desk. And if the President wants to make new laws about earmark spending, stem cell research, organization of labor unions, endangered species, or whatever else is on his political checklist, then maybe he should  just go back to the modest life of a single term junior senator from Illinois.