POLITICS - Federal Government According to "King George"

"Who Needs Congress or Courts With Bush in Charge?" by Ann Woolner, Bloomberg

Congress passes a law that says the U.S. won't torture people. The president says OK, we won't -- unless we really need to, thus adopting an exception Congress had specifically and vociferously rejected.

Congress passes the Sarbanes-Oxley law to reform business practices. In signing it, the president issues a statement to cut back on protection for corporate whistle-blowers.

Congress passes a law telling the administration to inform it on specific matters. The president issues statements saying he won't disclose anything he doesn't think he should.

So Congress tells him to notify it when he decides to ignore a law. He repeats that he will disclose only what he thinks he should, claiming, as he always does, constitutional authority to resist.

As of July 11, President George W. Bush had said no (or, not unless I want to) to 807 provisions enacted by Congress that he signed into law, according to Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at the University of Miami, Ohio.

That number compares to some 600 provisions challenged by all of Bush's predecessors combined, says Kelley. He has been studying presidential signing statements for a decade, and his work is backed up by other scholars.

Now comes a bipartisan American Bar Association task force, which concluded this week that presidential signing statements such as Bush's are "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.''

Equal Branches (reformatted):

• The Congress writes the laws
• The president executes them
• The courts decide whether they violate the Constitution

When a president claims he can rewrite a law before executing it, he is acting as all three branches.

In essences, if not fact, Bush says because of the one Constitutional clause that gives the President the job of protecting America, he has the right to ignore all other parts of the Constitution. Including the Bill of Rights. As if any one part of our Constitution overrides another.

There is no way I can know what my readers were taught in school, but the equal Constitutional powers of the 3 branches of our federal government stated above was what I was taught and firmly believe.