"I'm the Decider !!"

Hey Folks,

One Emperor,Napoleon, said: "History is what I say it is !"
How do you feel about that?

Another Emperor, G.W. Bush, said: "The law is what I say it is."

How do you feel about that ?

- Uke Man


You’ve got mail, and the president might be opening it
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
TOM TEEPEN

It turns out that as the holiday season was nearing its annual peak of panic and few were paying much attention to anything else, President Bush declared, in effect, that he is welcome to open your mail if he wants to.

Well, not him personally, of course. The president is a busy man. He would have his agents do it.

If not a fullblown flap, then at least a flaplet has been stirred by the New York Daily News’ discovery that Bush, as is his habit, first signed new legislation and then declared it null and void, sort of. The mechanism was the "presidential signing statement," a traditional option but in the past used rarely and mainly just to clarify technical ambiguities in a statute.

Bush alone has misused the signing statement as a means to undo Congress’s work wholesale — he has issued more than 800 so far — and, in sum, to declare he will rule by fiat whenever and however he jolly well pleases.

In the instant matter, Bush signed a law declaring that the government must get warrants to open first-class mail, but attached a signing statement saying his administration would take the provision as meaning "in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

Translated, that means be circumspect in your love letters.

The president’s spokesman, Tony Snow, shrugs off the matter. Bush, he says, was only reaffirming an authority sanctioned by long-standing law that the Postal Service may open first-class mail if there is good reason to suspect it contains a bomb or other material posing an immediate threat to public safety.

That would indeed be fine but, then, why this therefore-redundant codicil? And why is the administration resisting efforts by Salon.com to find out to what extent and in what way it may be recording envelope information from presumably unopened first-class mail?

No benefit of the doubt accrues to this administration in such matters. Remember, Bush used a similar dodge to poke into Americans’ overseas mail and phone calls without a warrant, even though lawful means stood ready for it to get a quickie OK from the very agreeable Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This is the most pathologically secretive administration of modern times — maybe ever, period.

The signing statement has been stud and joist alike to the administration’s construction of an executive branch unanswerable to court or Congress.

Bush has used signing statements to override or undermine laws requiring the FBI to tell Congress how it is using the Patriot Act to search homes and seize papers; forbidding the use of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading methods against prisoners; requiring that scientific information developed by government researchers be available uncensored to Congress, and instructing the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission not to bar employees from providing information to Congress.

You remember all that stuff you heard in civics class about this being a nation of laws, not of men? You might as well forget it. Certainly your president has.

Tom Teepen writes for Cox News Service.
teepencolumn@coxnews.com