Now … I’d love to hear your constitutional view on presidential signing statements.
You would ?
This president, in his self-anointed role as constitutional scholar, swore up and down in the 2008 campaign that there was no way in hell he would use signing statements when approving legislation.
He reneged on that New Year’s Eve in signing the “defense act”, accompanied by a long and elaborate signing statement, just as he reneged on his self-righteous 2007 insistence that it was “unpatriotic” and irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling and on his equally self-righteous insistence that using the (budget) reconciliation process (only 50% vote approval, not 2/3) would be completely wrong for massive social legislation like “healthcare”.
He reneges willy nilly on any and all so called “principled” stands he purported to hold in the past.
On occasion, when overly candid, he is wistful about the power of the hierarchy in China that can just “do stuff” without any messy process of involving other branches of government or the will of the people.
Given his conviction that he and his merry band of union supporting socialists know best for America and wrapped in his thin skin, Obama is downright hostile to the notion of constraints on the power of the Executive.
