With both Congress and the media unwilling or unable to challenge President Bush’s unprecendented accumulation of power, we should be grateful that the American Bar Association has had the courage to step into the breach.
A bipartisan task force appointed by ABA President David Greco took on the issue of the so-called signing statements Pres. Bush issues after he signs bills into law. In many of the over 800 statements issued by the president — a number that dwarfs the 600 or so such statements issued by all of his predecessors in the past 217 years, combined — the president has indicated that he intended to break the very the laws he just signed.
The ABA task force ruled that this countermanding of laws passed by Congress is unconstitutional.
With the media focused on the Israeli-Hezbollah war and the Iraqi Civil War, the ABA findings have gotten very little attention.
Imagine, if you will, that a Democratic president had been found to have deliberately and repeatedly engaged in unconstitutional activities. What a hew and cry there would be.
Now Sen. Arlen Specter says he just might sue the president over these activities. What we know for sure about Sen. Specter is that he is all bark and no bite. I, for one, am not expecting much.
Here’s a link to the ABA Task Force Report
And here’s a list of the task force members:
- Neal R. Sonnett, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney
- William S. Sessions, former director of the FBI
- Patricia M. Wald, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. and a one-time Carter appointee
- Former GOP Rep. Mickey Edwards
- Bruce Fein, an pro-impeachment talking head in the Clinton wars and former Reagan appointee
- Harold Hongju Koh, Dean of the Yale Law School
- Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor
- Prof. Stephen A. Saltzburg of George Washington University Law School who worked on the the Iran-Contra investigation
- Prof.Kathleen M. Sullivan of Stanford Law School
- Mark Agrast, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress
- Tom Susman, a partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm, has served as general counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee
- Alan Rothstein serves as advisor to the task force. He is general counsel to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and coordinates the extensive law reform and public policy work of that 22,000-member association. He also serves in the New York State Bar Association House of Delegates.
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I find it to be hysterically ironic that, after all the years the Rethuglicans have spent denigrating “trial lawyers” and assigning to them blame for the high cost of everything (Nuisance lawsuits, dontcha know!), that it is the trial lawyers who are now fighting back, are the sole protectors of our democracy, and that Bushco and his Republican Guard will now suffer the indignity of being sued out of existence.
I have been wondering for a while now from where all the future great statesmen and women of America would come, and now we know. Bush’s mental-midget, pseudo-intellectual, justify-anything-Bush-wants, so-called “legal experts” are fixing to get their asses handed to them and I for one can hardly wait.
By the time the ABA finishes with this crowd the “unitary executive with plenary powers” will be just another fading and forgotten neocon dream. I just hope they can petition for monetary reimbursement for all the damage done to our country, or at least speed the way to impeach Bush for his transgressions against the Constitution.
After all, if he has violated his oath of office and it is proven, Bush’s only options would be to resign in disgrace or be disgracefully impeached. HUZZAH!