Posted on 07/27/2006 7:50:36 PM PDT by AZRepublican
An American Bar Association task force has concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, president Bush has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action. Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds. "That non-veto hamstrings Congress because Congress cannot respond to a signing statement," said ABA president Michael Greco. The practice, he added "is harming the separation of powers."
Sen. Specter jumped into the fry by saying he will "submit legislation to the United States Senate which will...authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president's acts declared unconstitutional." Never mind that in my best guess two-thirds of all federal statutes have no basis in the US Constitution to exist. So why all the sudden interest in Bush’s signing statements when there is much more serious unconstitutional acts being perpetrated every day against the States and the people?
Tuesday the Senate passed an interstate abortion bill – a bill that would make it a crime to take a pregnant girl across state lines for an abortion without her parents' knowledge.
Talk about an outright and clear unconstitutional act.
Modern Washington has settled on the notion that any act by them or the Supreme Court that expands their power and influence is good, while anything that would tend to limit their power or influence is something bad and should be labeled unconstitutional at every opportunity. In a perverted way the Senate sees Bush’s signing statements more of a threat to their own exercise of unconstitutional acts then with the concern over a president engaged in unconstitutional acts himself.
If Congress were really concerned with the constitutionality of Bush’s signing statements all they have to do is append a simple one-sentence line to their bills striking down any attempt by the president to insert his own interpretation into the law.
The executive branch is part of a “checks and balance” scheme that protects the States and the people from the legislative branch exercising powers not expressly delegated to them to exercise. Many wrongly assume the Supreme Court is the only arbitrator of what is constitutional or not – but the legislative and executive branch are equally empowered to determine what is permissible and what isn’t under the US Constitution (hint: they take a oath to uphold it, not unilaterally expand it.) It is the president’s primary job during peace to make sure laws sent to him for signing are sanctioned by the letter of the US Constitution.
When is the last time president Bush vetoed a bill because he found it unconstitutional? If what Congress is attempting to do is not supported by any of the limited powers vested to Congress to exercise, then it is the responsibility of the president to see to it that law never becomes law.
Congress has so far exceeded the very principle of our republican form of government -- which rests on specific limited powers -- by expanding its powers without the consent of the people in such a way that they now suck much of the wealth out of the States by such unconstitutional acts as re-defining the sixteenth amendment’s 1909 term of “income” to mean what they prefer it to mean in today’s terms. This has made the States ever so dependent upon the federal government exercising unconstitutional powers in attempt to retrieve much of this wealth the federal government draws into their coffers via individual taxation.
This abuse of the power of expanded taxation over State citizens is a power the States never surrendered or consented for the federal government to exercise. Income was understood to mean unearned wealth (read: dividends) so that the little guy would not be burdened with carrying the national government through consumption taxation, while wealthy stockholders would become the national governments new source of revenue.
Governor Wilson of KY said at the time the "poor man does not regard his wages or salary as ‘an income'." Neither did anyone else; for if they had there would have been no 16th amendment, as we know it today.
The safeguard of “checks and balances” has long been broken with the establishment of partisan politics and the disregard for the foundation of which our mixed form of government rests. So what the ABA and the Senate is whining over is really small potatoes while ignoring the real constitutional crisis we all face across our nation today. Sen. Specter I am afraid is only making a spectacle of himself on this issue.
Talk about an outright and clear unconstitutional act.
Under whose authority would such an act fall? I don't think Kansas could pass a law forbidding someone from taking a pregnant girl out of Kansas to have an abortion elsewhere, since the abortion would be outside Kansas' jurisdiction.
The real intention of the federal law, I think, is to enhance the effectiveness of states' parental-notification laws. I don't see the problem with that. Since abortion is not generally done for free, it constitutes a form of "commerce". Transporting a person across state lines for purposes of having an abortion is a lot closer to "interstate commerce" than is growing cannabis within a state for purposes of consumption within that state.
> Under whose authority would such an act fall?
Clearly a State since they have absolute jurisdiction over everything within their jurisidiction.
> The real intention of the federal law, I think, is to
> enhance the effectiveness of states' parental-notification
> laws. I don't see the problem with that. Since abortion is
> not generally done for free, it constitutes a form of
> "commerce". Transporting a person across state lines for
> purposes of having an abortion is a lot closer to
> "interstate commerce" than is growing cannabis within a
> state for purposes of consumption within that state.
If you read what madison has wrote about the commerce clause you will find the power to regulate commerce is identical between the states, foreign countries and indian tribes. So if a law under the commerce clause is constitutional it has to be constitutional when applied to say Paris, France. No one will argue that Congress has the power under the commerce clause to regulate abortion clinics across France.
Talk about an outright and clear unconstitutional act.
How's that Unconstitutional? It's called a prohibition against "kidnapping".
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