"The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws and not men," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1803. The phrase has echoed down the ages.
It echoes in the words of the great Abraham Lincoln regarding the execution of John Brown in 1859 as the country lurched toward the precipice of civil war.
"Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right."
Think about those words. Though noble John Brown acted for what he saw as the right, in a cause that Abraham Lincoln and his followers agreed was right, it could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.
That is what it means when we claim to live in a nation of laws, not men.
Today the Government Accountability Office released a study citing instances in which George W. Bush’s signing statements have undercut federal law.
According to the G.A.O federal agencies had executed laws in a limited or restricted way that coincided more with the language of the presidential signing statement than with the wording of the law.
Among bills the president appears to have successfully neutered are laws requiring budgetary transparency regarding the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina reconstruction.
The Congressional Research Service estimates that as of April 13, 2007 Bush had issued 149 of these statements.
The Constitution grants Congress alone with the power to write laws. What Bush asserts to have is a power of line item veto that is provided for by neither the Constitution or by statutory law.
The President of the United States has two and only two options when a bill passed by both houses of the United States Congress arrives on his desk. Though there are various bits of legal minutiae he can use in either case, he either allows the bill to become law or prevents it from doing so.
There is no third path. He has no power to amend, no power to revise. The President either accepts or rejects the bill as written.
In 1999 the Republican majority in congress attempted to remove President Bill Clinton from office for violating exactly law: committing perjury when questioned under oath about Monica Lewinsky. (We'll set aside the delicious irony that these same champions of truth, justice and the American way think perjury insignificant now that it applies to Scooter Libby for another day.)
Today the man who sits in the chair of the President of the United States is a serial lawbreaker. He violates historic international agreements like the Geneva Convention with impunity; he orders illegal spying within the United States on a level Richard Nixon on peyote never dreamed imaginable; and with his own pen he has brazenly denied the expressed will of Congress, the legitimate elected representatives of the American people, no fewer than one-hundred and forty-nine times! If that's not grounds for impeachment I don't know what is.
We are a nation of laws not men we proclaim, but just what does that mean? It means nothing, no Reichstag fire, no 9/11, not even a god-damned nuclear attack, allows the President of the United States to claim the powers of a tyrant.
"If this were a dictatorship it be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," George Bush once joked. I for one am not laughing.
The time is long past for the leadership of both political parties to get up off of the floor and beginning the process of removing this serial criminal from office.