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so a signing statement is an official legal document that a president
issues on the day he signs a bill into law
files it in the federal register
and it consists of instructions to the executive branch about how they are to implement
the new statutes created by a bill
%uh now that they're on the books
and where this becomes controversial is where a president uses a signing statement to instruct
the executive branch
that it will consider certain sections of this bill unconstitutional
so that they do not need to enforce the law as it is written
and it becomes very controversial when those sections that he's challenging
are restrictions on his own authority
because then not enforcing the law really means not having to obey the law
and uh
this previous presidents have done this but it was exceedingly rare
until the mid-nineteen eighties when the reagan
administration's legal team decided they could start doing this more often as a way to increase
presidential power
sam alito was part of that effort
%uh and through
explain why they thought
the courts might look at this as sort of legislative history so the original idea was that
activist courts
were interpreting laws based on
legislative history that is the record of debate that congress had when they were
passing a law to sort of figure out what a law meant and judges were sort of picking and choosing
what they wanted from that universe
to support whatever their previous their
preferred policy which is probably true by the way but anyway one of scalia's great
crusades he hates this stuff because it's so open to manipulation
as log as this is happening we should at least get the president's views in there so
maybe when there's an ambiguous statute the president should leave a record of his understanding
of what it means and if there's a dispute later the court will look to that and the president
will have greater influence as the sort of final word
over
what the law will be interpreted to mean
and turns out that that never happened courts really just haven't looked at signing
statements
but it this tool became powerful in this other way of
shaping how the executive branch was going to implement laws
and even not implementing those the president thought were unconstitutional
and so %uh
george h w bush issued a bunch bill clinton a democrat also issued a bunch
but then the bush cheney administration took this to a
whole new exponential leap
and %uh at this point
%uh the count is over a thousand bill sections a thousand laws that just in
six
years bush
challenged using signing statements
which is
more than all previous presidents in american history combined
so this is dramatic even with the increases starting in the reagan years
almost double all previous presidents in history combined
%uh and includes the mccain torture ban which bush said this is unconstitutional because of my
unwritten powers as commander in chief and because of the
unitary executive theory
oversight provisions that were added to the patriot act as a by congress as a condition
of making that law permanent
but also things that have nothing to do with national security all kinds
affirmative action regulations
%uh requirements to give reports to congress about all kinds of things
all over the map anything that requires the executive branch to do something
or forbids it from doing something
under the bush legal theories is unconstitutional because the president has total control over
government information over the executive power