Another So-Called "Signing Statement" from Der Führer

From The Boston Globe:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

If I was in Congress, I think I'd be getting pretty tired of this shit by now. BushCo obviously considers Congress to be nothing more than a glorified advisory panel. But I'm sure Senator Pat Roberts and the rest of the police-state supporters in Congress are perfectly fine with this.

And on a completely related subject, Senator Russ Feingold had this to say about his fellow Democrats' opposition to his resolution to censure Bush for illegally authorizing the warrantless surveillance program:

"These Democratic pundits are all scared of the Republican base getting energized, but they're willing to pay the price of not energizing the Democratic base," he said. "It's an overly defensive and meek approach to politics."

Feingold is obviously right, and I just don't get it. Republicans running for reelection this year are going to be climbing over each other to distance themselves from the Bush Regime, and PoliceStateGate is merely a minor piece of the overall BushCo failure. As Time Magazine points out:

As the campaign season kicks into gear, Republican incumbents are having a hard time figuring out how close they want to be to the White House. Voters have plenty to take out on Republican candidates this year—ethics scandals, the g.o.p.'s failure to curb spending, the government's inept response to Hurricane Katrina, a confusing new prescription-drug program for seniors and, more than anything else, an unpopular President who is fighting an unpopular war. Iraq could make a vulnerability of the Republicans' greatest asset, the security issue.

The midterm contests in a President's second term are almost always treacherous, but this time around, Republicans thought it would be different. The 2006 elections, coming on top of their gains in 2002 and 2004, would make history and perhaps even cement a g.o.p. majority in Congress for a generation. George W. Bush's credibility on national security and the states' aggressive gerrymandering, they believed, had turned the vast majority of districts into fortresses for incumbents. But that's not turning out to be the case.

In recent weeks, a startling realization has begun to take hold: if the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who masterminded the 1994 elections that brought Republicans to power on promises of revolutionizing the way Washington is run, told Time that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: "Had enough?"

Do most Democrats in the Senate really think that backing Feingold's censure resolution would work to reinvigorate such a wildly unpopular president? The answer to that question appears to be "yes." In other words, the Democratic Party seems to think that fully supporting Feingold's censure resolution will somehow cause the voting public to forget Katrina, the Iraq War, Tora Bora, global warming, Tom DeLay, TreasonGate, Jack Abramoff, Terri Schiavo, the Medicare Debacle, the Dubai Ports deal, etc. etc. etc.

I guess that is possible, but I think that Newt is probably right -- the American people have finally "had enough" of GOP leadership, and this means that the Democrats need to start aggressively refreshing the voters' memories with regard to why America hates Bush so much.