It all seemed so legal

Obama Looks to Limit Impact of Tactic Bush Used to Sidestep New Laws

Calling into question the legitimacy of all the signing statements that former President George W. Bush used to challenge new laws, President Obama ordered executive officials on Monday to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before relying on any of them to bypass a statute.

But Mr. Obama also signaled that he intended to use signing statements himself if Congress sent him legislation with provisions he decided were unconstitutional. He promised to take a modest approach when using the statements, legal documents issued by a president the day he signs bills into law that instruct executive officials how to put the statutes into effect. But Mr. Obama said there was a role for the practice if used appropriately.

“In exercising my responsibility to determine whether a provision of an enrolled bill is unconstitutional, I will act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded,” Mr. Obama wrote in a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch.

And with that, another of the Bush Administration's bright ideas is declared to be insanity. No more freestyling statements that take a law and twist it and turn it into something that means the opposite for the executive branch or discards the law entirely. I don't know why people would ever see a need to change this idea in the first place. First our elected betters in the Senate go to all the hard work of destroying what was probably a good idea by watering it down and adding all kinds of loopholes and inadequacies. You're telling me the President shouldn't be allowed to take that hard work and sign it into law, with the caveat that he is in no way bound by that law or will be subject to any prosecution for breaking that law? This hardly seems like America anymore.

Among Bush's 1200 signing statements were a scrawled "Nuh-uh" on a law providing Congressional oversight for Katrina, a decree that all bills with the phrases "no torture" or "cannot torture" were to be read as "go torture" or alternately "why aren't you torturing now? stop reading and go dunk that Arab's Koran in something.", or Bush's favorite one "do opposite" with an arrow pointing to some provision. In the end he even had a rubber stamp made up that said "Fuck this shit" that John Yoo and David Addington said would legally allow him to ignore any law he signed.

The directive by President Obama to ignore all Bush signing statements will be followed by the Justice Department unless they discover a signing statement by Bush declaring Obama has to follow them or Obama himself makes a signing statement declaring them valid. Legally/constitutionally we don't even need Congress, provided the President can write down a better law in the margins of the one he's supposedly signing. I think Madison or some other dude said so in the Federalist Papers.