Not Me

Salon's War Room has a great summation of a story appearing in the Boston Globe, which points out that President Bush used a "signing statement" on the recent signing of the Patriot Act reauthorization to let everyone know how he really feels--i.e., he doesn't have to comply with it. This is the same tactic that he used to undermine the John McCain torture ban bill.

Bush signs the bill with all the usual fanfare -- check out the desk decorated with the "Protecting the Homeland" banner -- and then quietly issues a signing statement in which he says he doesn't think that the legislation he has signed really means what it says.
[...]
"The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch ... in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties," the signing statement says.

As the Globe notes, those congressional oversight provisions were the subject of "intense negotiations in Congress." Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy calls Bush's effort to eliminate them with a few strokes of the pen "nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."