The Young Turks

Good, I'm glad. The pendulum swings both ways. I find it ironic that Supreme Court nominees often backfire in the long run. Stevens, the most progressive member of the Court was considered a moderate republican and was nominated by Gerry Ford, mouthpiece for Tricky Dick: father of the neo-cons, advocate of the imperial presidency, and possibly the creator or the modern notion of the unitary executive theory. Um, that one backfired. Big time. Did anyone think that when Bush was running roughshod over the Constitution (and with the neo-con foxnews double-speak at the same time doing it in the very name of the Constitution) that it would not at some point come back to haunt them?

I think it is fucking awesome. Turn swords into plowshares. Use their own tools of destruction against them. Perhaps when Barack (or Hillary) is president, he/she can use signing statements to thwart Congressional attempts to bypass rewriting the capital gains tax (Barack has pledged to raise them back to pre-Clinton 30 percent, Hillary up to 20 percent) and the rest of  Rep. Rangell's measures.

I think it is also important to note that a signing statement does not have to be used as a "backdoor line item veto" and that it can be used for something closer to the intent of the real purpose for which it was created. Let's take Clinton's watershed off-road vehicle forestry thingy, his last major act, where he left an environmental legacy equal to TR or Ike. (Now it seems to be more fashionable to have Peace-in-the-Middle-East, or at least the photo-op.)

Let's say that consumer advocate par excellence Ralph Nader hadn't run in 2000 and that Gore won both the popular and electoral college vote and wasn't robbed of the presidency. And then let us say that the Republican led congress passed bills to allow for ATV's, snow mobiles and the like in places like Jellystone. But what if this hypothetical law was then used by logging companies as an excuse to build roads into protected groves, woodlands and habitats, and to thereby gain access to old growth. Gore could have then written a signing statement on the law, not enacting his own law, nor dismissing the law altogether, nor even stepping on the Court's third branch right to interpret. Merely stating the scope by which the law should be enforced.

Gore might want to outlaw ATV's and snowmobiles from places like Jellystone. In this hypothetical situation, that would be acting like Bush (in terms of the signing statements, Bush would never want to outlaw anything as fun or freewheeling as smog smokemachine snowmobiles or four wheelers). Bush has used signing statements to legalize torture and illegal wiretapping, but as much as I'm against those things I'm not against the signing statement if used correctly. And by correctly I don't mean for liberal causes or green ones either.  

The point is, if a law is being used to create a loophole that could take two years to reach the court, the executive branch has the right to define the scope by which it should be enforced, not gut it nor ignore it, merely define it.

The larger issues of the line item veto, the unitary executive, earmarks, pork barrel spending, the federal budget deficit, top secret earmarks, the bridge to nowhere, lobbyists and John McCain's lace undies fund (you know, the stash of cash for those "special" lobbyists) still need to be dealt with though. Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy, A New Vision of Hope with the Experience to Get the Job Done!