I’ve written previously about President Bush’s fondness for using signing statements to secure wiggle room in legislation passed that the administration doesn’t believe it should be bound by.
The GAO has been poking around to see how the Administration has been using that wiggle room. Per the Washington Post, the findings include:
For example, Congress directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to relocate its checkpoints around Tucson every seven days to improve efforts to combat illegal immigration. But the agency took the law as an “advisory provision” that was “not always consistent with CBP’s mission requirements.” Instead, the agency periodically shut down its checkpoints for short periods of time, believing that would comply with congressional demands.
Frustrated by the Pentagon’s broad budget submissions for the “global war on terrorism,” Congress demanded in its 2006 military spending law that the Defense Department break down its 2007 budget request to show the detailed costs of global military operations, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The department ignored the order. While the Pentagon did break out the costs of operations in the Balkans and at Guantanamo Bay, it did not detail expenditures in other operations.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency also ignored Congress’s demand that it submit an expenditure plan for housing assistance and alternatives to the approaches that failed after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA told the GAO that it does not normally produce such plans.
Nothing too earthshattering there, as WaPo notes, but it is sufficient fuel to inflame Democratic partisans seeking additional weaponry to bring to bear against the administration.
While I think the tangible examples of the signing statements being used to deviate from Congressional intent aren’t as egregious as the Dems likely would have the public believe, I am not a fan of the abuse of signing statements. Therefore, I wouldn’t be too displeased to get this issue hashed out in terms of its Constitutionality.