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one of the things as signing statements became really interesting last year
they were always interesting as more and more people started paying attention to them obviously there
were a few
political scholars who were paying attention to them all along and they were very prescient
what's actually happening is this just chest
beating
i can do this if i want to but he's not actually following through in not obeying these laws
in
the most interesting ones are all involving national security and there's no way for us
to independently know
you know is someone being tortured or not
i don't know but %uh
this this last year the government accountability office at the request of
the now democratic senate did a
did a study of
nineteen of the eleven hundred laws that bush had signing statemented and they were
all different types none of them had to do with national security they were 0:00:49.200,0:00:51.720 more tame examples
just to begin to understand when you peel back what's happening in the executive branch
are these being
%uh obeyed or not
and they found that
three had not been triggered by circumstances so the law it's unclear whether the law
what happened because the law never had to be enforced
of the sixteen that were obeyed
as written despite the fact bush had challenged them but six were not
and these were these were small things there was a law that said
%uh in the tucson sector the immigration
%uh police
who look for illegal immigrants had to move their checkpoints
every couple days because evidently they were getting lazy and sitting in one spot
and illegal immigrants from mexico were sort of knowing where to avoid that spot
and the local congressman
was annoyed and passed this law saying 0:01:38.720,0:01:44.310 in my role regulating the executive branch and congress' role this has to be changed
and bush put a signing statement on it that said
that law will be viewed as advisory only because i decide how to deploy
troops and I decide how to deploy immigration agents
and the g_a_o_ found in fact they just sat there they did not move around at all as the law said they did
and they went there and they asked how come you're not moving
and the answer was well this law is merely advisory and it used the answer from
the agency used the same language as the signing statement
so that was a strong sign that these things are in fact having an impact
there's another one just now %uh that there's a law that congress passed that said
if you were born in jerusalem and you become a u_s_ citizen your passport has to be stamped
that you were born in israel which of course is a disputed issue is jerusalem part of israel
or not
and bush put a signing statement on it saying i have exclusive control of foreign affairs so the state department
will not
enforce this law
that was a rare case where there someone actually had standing to sue so someone who
had been born in jerusalem and wanted his passport to say israel sued and just last week
a federal judge threw the case out and said this is a political question %uh and you guys have
to decide for yourself and of course what that means is the executive branch wins because
it has the first mover advantage it does something and unless congress is going to go to war you
know and impeach the president
they win and they're not going to impeach bush over whether someone's passports says israel or
and
and so so they're real
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