Talking Points Memo is not impressed with the Presidential Signing Statement either...
In a nutshell: President Bush is claiming extraordinary authority to circumvent Congressional restrictions on defence appropriations through a signing statement on the DoD appropriations bill.
A read of it suggests the president claims the right to divert funding to do things not covered by the appropriations, and even things explicitly forbidden by subsequent Congressional amendments.
This includes initiating classified programs and actions, and doing so without notifying Conress, as required by law.
Ok, so maybe I wasn't being paranoid.
That is rather unfortunate.
It is not clear these signing statement would stand if challenged in court, or even if Congress just put their foot down; but, in a crisis they could use them to prolong the issue long past the point where normal presidents would have accepted that they had been pushed back. Congress also yields a little bit of power each time they let them get away with this - for example, diversion of funding from Afghanistan to prepare for the Iraq war is arguably an instance of this happening in the past, and Congress letting it slide. So they might have a case, by default, since Congress failed to put their foot down when the push began.
Where Olbermann made me think about how I would set the stage if I were the Unitary Executive
in which I actually read what they did
The Presidential signing statement on 2007 DoD Appropriations
House Resolution 5631 - Department of Defence Appropriations, 2007 (pdf)
speculations on what they might want to do with this claimed authority
Prof Foland at Nuclear Mangos has some thoughts
Bother. This was supposed to be "science only week".
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I just came by to drop you a note that I saw TPM had it up! Spencer Ackerman is on the case--that's good news. Well done.