Statement by the President on H.R. 1540

[Igel]

69. Not true.

It can be in some cases. Often the president will have a written record of his interpretation that will help the courts come to a conclusion about what the legislation actually means. (For those judges that try to figure out Congress's intent, instead of what a lawyer wants the language, 5 or 50 years later, to have always meant.)

In many other cases the signing statement says how the law will be implemented. In one * signing statement that required some dept. chief to sign to confirm the contents of a report, the statement pointed out that under one statute the phrase for affirming the report contents meant nothing more than certifying that his dept. really did produce the report. No big deal. But under a different statute, the phrase used meant that the signer had personally verified everything in the report, subject to perjury laws if he was wrong or failed to verify any. Since the report was a compendium of expenses of various kinds that would run to over 1000 pages, the second definition would be crazy to apply. You don't want an agency chief doing nothing all year long but verifying each numbers. * said he'd interpret the law to only mean the former, not the latter, definition. I like this kind of section in a signing statement. It's useful and transparent.

In other cases a signing statement nullifies or seems to nullify a provision, at least in principle. This takes three forms.

The first is actual nullification. The president says a bit of a bill violates the separation of powers principle behind our government or some other bit of the Constitution (textual or inferred) and then actually ignores that part of the bill. Since it's unclear who'd enforce the provision, it goes unimplemented. "You way I must eat chocolate meringue pie. I hate chocolate and meringue. Screw you."

The second form is weasely. He president claims that something already in place or some alternative actually satisfies the bill's text so he's implemented the law already, however ludicrous the claim. He actually ignores the law by insisting that something that doesn't satisfy the law actually does. Obama does this in the above signing statement. "Yes, I'm going to follow the requirement that I eat chocolate meringue pie, but I interpret 'chocolate' to be anything derived from a tropical seed, and "meringue" to be any kind of whipped light-colored topping. Here, have a cappucino, made with tropical coffee seeds and topped with whipped milk. Sorry, did I say 'cappucino'? I mean 'chocolate meringue pie'."

The third kind of nullification is fictive. The president argues that the bill violates the separation of powers or some Constitutional prerogative the president claims. Nobody can claim that he's ceded his authority at that point--he's rejected the usurpation, real or not, of his authority. *Then* the president goes right ahead and does what the law says, but now can always claim that he wasn't implementing an unconstitutional law but was just doing what he wanted. Often he "follows" the law more closely under this kind of legal but meaningless nullification then he does when he claims he's just "alternatively interpreting" the law. "I reject any legal requirement that I eat chocolate meringue pie as an imposition as a violation of constitutional powers. There, that's done. I have an important announcement next month." Next month: "I'd like to announce that in solidarity with the American Union of Custard Pie Producers, we will be serving chocolate meringue pie at every White House function."

When the bill's signed, the difference between the first and third way of "nullifying" a provision are indistinguishable. The verbiage and 'tude are the same. You have to bother to go back a year or two later to see if the "ignored" law was actually ignored or if it was just independently and voluntarily followed.