Pick and Choose Your Laws
The Bush administration's legal intrerpretations

There exists a well-known loophole in the student loan subsidy program that unfairly enriches some lending institutions at the expense of the American tax-payer. The WP article Lawmakers Again Target Maligned Student Loan Subsidy exposes this practice, which could be effectively ended through executive action. It notes the ademinstration response:

Republicans also lament the subsidy. But they say their hands have been tied by statute and legal interpretations dating to the Clinton presidency.

"The law is the law is the law," said Sally L. Stroup, assistant secretary of education for postsecondary education. "What the law says is what you pay people. We didn't make this stuff up. We may not like it and nobody else may like it, but we can't just unilaterally ignore Congress."

In the same edition of the WP, another article, Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor, discusses the administration's propensity to select legal advisers who will give it the green light for almost anything, including assassination, torture and unauthorized wiretaps:

Refining what constitutes an assassination was just one of many legal interpretations made by Bush administration lawyers. Time and again, the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s, according to these officials and seven lawyers who once worked on these matters.

It seems executive privilege only allows assaults on civil liberties, not corporate profits.