The Right to Be Wrong
The Czech director Milos Foreman once told of growing up under Gestapo rule. It was a tragedy, he said, whereas later, under the Soviets, it was farce. I have some of that same feeling now with our present administration, except that comedy and tragedy seem mixed in equal parts. I have a feeling few people are aware of, or understand the implications of the "signing statement." To be sure, presidents have used it in the past, but only rarely, whereas this president has made something of a fetish of it. It's the presidential version of lying with your fingers crossed behind your back. When a bill passed by Congress gets to his desk the president signs it, but attaches to it a statement that he doesn't intend to enforce any part of it he doesn't like. It's completely unconstitutional, but that doesn't stop a spoiled rich kid.
posted by John M Crowther @ 6:55 AM
4 Comments:
A friend of mine,past president of the American Political Science Association , told me that we should give the Iraqis our constitution since we don't use it anymore. roger
Roger this sounds like some of that comedy and tragedy mixed in equal parts that John was talking about! LOL
So how does it work John? (sorry if this is a silly question) Does congress say this is how it's going to be and the President can then say "over my dead body" if he feels like it? Yeah? Is this an invention of the current administration?
In constitutional law signing statements have no status at all. They had been rarely used by previous presidents generally to register an objection to a law that the president basically accepted.Roger
I’ve got a right! Haven’t we all. But of all of our inalienable rights the one for which I will fight to the death comes from a song by Harold Arlen I first heard sung and played on the trombone by the immortal artist Jack Teagarden:
“I've got a right to sing the blues,
Got the right to moan and sigh
I've got a right to sit and cry
Down along the river.”
Arlen never specifies which body of water gives us citizens that right; I have always suspected it to be the Mississippi or one of its tributaries. I sincerely doubt if one could sit and cry along the Hudson without being picked up for vagrancy, and as for the LA River, most of the year it is totally dry. I have nothing against the Thames or the Seine but the exchange rate of the $$$ is now so low few of us can afford it. In any event:
”Call it love, say what you choose
I've got an (inalienable) right to sing the blues.”
God bless democracry!
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