Savage Realizations

You've got to hand it to the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage; if he doesn't like how the facts are arranged, he's more than willing to arrange them on his own. Such was the case in his article Hearing vowed on Bush's powers.

The main focus of the article was President Bush's decision to use Presidential signing statements to bypass provisions of 750 bills that the President thinks may conflict with the Constitution. According to the definition provided by Savage in his article, signing statements are:

…official documents in which a president lays out his interpretation of a bill for the executive branch, creating guidelines to follow when it implements the law. The statements are filed without fanfare in the federal record, often following ceremonies in which the president made no mention of the objections he was about to raise in the bill, even as he signed it into law.

That's what Charlie wants you to see. How about another perspective?

Walter Dellinger, Assistant Attorney General under President Clinton, wrote to Bernard Nussbaum, Counsel to President Clinton, in 1993, The Legal Significance of Signing Statements:

To begin with, it appears to be an uncontroversial use of signing statements to explain to the public, and more particularly to interested constituencies, what the President understands to be the likely effects of the bill, and how it coheres or fails to cohere with the Administration's views or programs.

A second, and also generally uncontroversial, function of Presidential signing statements is to guide and direct Executive officials in interpreting or administering a statute. The President has the constitutional authority to supervise and control the activity of subordinate officials within the Executive Branch…

[snip]

A third function, more controversial than either of the two considered above, is the use of signing statements to announce the President's view of the constitutionality of the legislation he is signing. This category embraces at least three species: statements that declare that the legislation (or relevant provisions) would be unconstitutional in certain applications; statements that purport to construe the legislation in a manner that would "save" it from unconstitutionality; and statements that state flatly that the legislation is unconstitutional on its face. Each of these species of statement may include a declaration as to how -- or whether -- the legislation will be enforced.

Thus, the President may use a signing statement to announce that, although the legislation is constitutional on its face, it would be unconstitutional in various applications, and that in such applications he will refuse to execute it. Such a Presidential statement could be analogized to a Supreme Court opinion that upheld legislation against a facial constitutional challenge, but warned at the same time that certain applications of the act would be unconstitutional.

[snip]

In each of the last three Administrations, the Department of Justice has advised the President that the Constitution provides him with the authority to decline to enforce a clearly unconstitutional law. This advice is, we believe, consistent with the views of the Framers. Moreover, four sitting Justices of the Supreme Court have joined in the opinion that the President may resist laws that encroach upon his powers by "disregard[ing] them when they are unconstitutional."

(note: footnote numbers stripped for readability)

The four justices? Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter. One might have reason to believe that Justice Alito and/or Chief Justice Roberts would make a similar judgment, rendering a majority decision of 5-4 or 6-3 in the President's favor on the modern Court, though Savage couldn't be troubled to go through the "extensive research" once could do in several minutes on Google that led to this potentially important information.

In other words, despite Specter's incessant grandstanding, John Dean's whining and Savage's perhaps intentionally leading framing, it appears that while Bush's frequency in using signing statements is unusual, it does have both precedent and the apparent support of the Supreme Court.

Of course, Charlie Savage isn't quite done there. Why stop with a little misdirection, when you can try adding to The Big Lie?

Speaking of the President executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct targeted intercepts of suspected terrorist communications where at least one end was on foreign soil, Savage wrote:

Feingold is an outspoken critic of Bush's assertion that his wartime powers give him the authority to set aside laws. The senator has proposed censuring Bush over his domestic spying program, in which the president secretly authorized the military to wiretap Americans' phones without a warrant, bypassing a 1978 surveillance law.

But Savage's assertion as to the nature of the program is is false, and demonstrably so. Not one single claim has ever been made that shows this was a domestic spying program. In all instances, from the original article written in the NY Times, to specific comments made about the program by former NSA director General Michael V. Hayden, to comments made by the White House itself, it has been emphatically stated that the program is not domestic, but international in nature. International means more than one country, which was a primary criteria for all of these intercepts. My six-year-old can understand that oft-repeated concept, so why is it so difficult for Savage to understand? The intercepts were also not a wiretapping of Americans' phones, another "fact" Mr. Savage conveniently cannot support.

Once you have the real facts and misrepresentations of this Globe article laid out in front of you, it is hardly surprising that a recent Reuters poll found that 69% of Americans don't trust the media. With reporters like Charlie Savage more interested in manufacturing news than reporting it, why should they?