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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex MG who wrote (244015)	2/4/2014 10:52:27 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541625

More on the imperial presidency, from a path that few but da Rat have dared to tread...copying somebody else's work about signing statements. Why the Obama Administration Has Issued Fewer Signing Statements 2/4/13 A signing statement is written commentary on a bill that is being signed into law. The scholarly literature has shown that these statements can serve a wide range of purposes (praise, criticism, credit claiming, legislative appeals, etc.). Most controversially, presidents offer their opinion about the constitutionality of various provisions of law and allude to non-enforcement (or altered enforcement in order to avoid constitutional conflicts). President George W. Bush made the constitutional challenges within signing statements (in)famous by citing problems with approximately 1,200 provisions of legislation; double the amount of all the previous presidents combined. Those challenges can be found within Bush’s 112 first-term statements and his 50 second-term statements. The Obama administration has only issued 22 statements during his first term. While these statements are chock-full of constitutional challenges (Obama’s most recent NDAA signing statement challenges more than 20 sections of law on constitutional grounds), the lack of frequency with which the administration issues them leaves Obama nowhere close to Bush in terms of the number of provisions challenged over a similar timeframe.... millercenter.org

To: Alex MG who wrote (244015)	2/4/2014 11:05:26 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 541625

When I was young and taught high school, I always made it a point to show a documentary on Nazi concentration camps. Who were these people? Were they unique in their brutality? Of course not. They were we. So my entire life I looked for these people in my society, incognito, cloaked in the dressings of a modern democratic society. But I could see them. I could see them 80 years ago in Hitler's Germany brutalizing the innocent. All my life I have carried that knowledge around with me as a low grade anger toward much of my species. I never did learn what to do with that knowledge, or my anger.