Hey, Specter to the Rescue Again... hurray...

Why do I get the feeling of deja vu from the king of the "strongly worded letter":

A powerful Republican committee chairman who has led the fight against President Bush's signing statements said Monday he would have a bill ready by the end of the week allowing Congress to sue him in federal court.

"We 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," Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.

Specter's announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president 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.

(Here's a story on the ABA decision, by the way)

Ah yes, a day without Arlen Specter talking tough about the Administration without action is like a day without sunshine. The end result is ALWAYS disappointing. He gets to look like the big man without changing the status quo one bit. Case in point: we're at a time where a federal judge is so concerned about the NSA illegal spying program that he refused to throw out the case on national security grounds, which almost never happens when the government asks for it. This signals that the judicial branch is extremely sympathetic to the argument that the President and the Administration is breaking the law.

Arlen Specter is basically trying to get that case thrown out of court all by himself:

With the Specter legislation, Bush has not agreed to allow the FISA court, or any other court, to adjudicate the legality of his eavesdropping program (meaning whether he has been violating the law for the last five years by ordering warrantless eavesdropping). To the contrary, the Specter bill would all but kill pending litigations around the country which allege that the President acted criminally by violating FISA. Nor would the Specter bill require the President to submit eavesdropping requests to courts for approval. To the contrary, the bill expressly allows the President to eavesdrop on Americans with no judicial oversight.

The sole question which a court will decide under this claimed oral agreement between Specter and the President is whether warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth Amendment. Thus, what Specter is celebrating here is that the President courteously agreed to "allow" a federal court to decide whether the eavesdropping he has ordered on Americans violates the Constitution's prohibition on searches and seizures in the absence of probable cause warrants. Since when does a President have the option to prohibit judicial determinations as to whether his conduct violates the Constitutional rights of American citizens? In what conceivable way can it be said to be a "concession" that George Bush has deigned to permit a federal court to rule on the constitutionality of the eavesdropping he ordered?

So I'm sure plenty of my fellow liberals will get fired up about Specter's lawsuit, and then after negotiations it'll be revealed that this actually gives Bush the option to sure himself, and Specter will write an op-ed saying "The President NEVER would have thought about suing himself before this important legislation," and we'll wonder how we got duped again.

I'll tell you how. We listened to Arlen Specter. At least you did.

As a postscript, I want to highlight this bold-faced lie from the AP article:

Bush is not without congressional allies on the matter. Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, a former judge, has said that signing statements are nothing more than expressions of presidential opinion that carry no legal weight because federal courts are unlikely to consider them when deciding cases that challenge the same laws.

Oh really, Senator? Read much? (hat tip to hekebolos)

In his dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court's decision on Guantanamo Bay military trials earlier this month, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a presidential signing statement significant weight in determining the meaning of a statute, marking a milestone in the debate over the Bush administration's expansion of executive power.

...Scalia's dissenting opinion gave Bush's signing statement on a Guantanamo-related law passed by Congress equal weight to statements by the bill's authors, suggesting that there is no legal difference between the views of Congress and the president about what a law means.

At issue was a December 2005 law curtailing the rights of Guantanamo detainees to file lawsuits. The Supreme Court's majority ruled that the law applied only to future cases, so that existing suits could go forward. But in his dissent, Scalia scolded the majority, saying it had selectively cited bits of the act's legislative history to support its view and downplayed contrary evidence -- including the signing statement Bush issued on Dec. 30, 2005.

"Of course in its discussion of legislative history the court wholly ignores the president's signing statement, which explicitly set forth his understanding that the [Detainee Treatment Act] ousted jurisdiction over pending cases," Scalia wrote.

Were Scalia's opinion in the majority, and it was one vote away from being so, that would be pretty much the end of democracy in America. The President, under the Constitution, can sign a law or veto it. He doesn't get to re-interpret it. That's the job of the courts. You'd think that "strict constructionist" Antonin Scalia would know that. But of course, he's only an originalist when it supports his argument. Otherwise he gets rather, er, original with the law.