Pelosi threat to sue Bush over Iraq bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is threatening to take President Bush to court if he issues a signing statement as a way of sidestepping a carefully crafted compromise Iraq war spending bill.

Pelosi recently told a group of liberal bloggers, “We can take the president to court” if he issues a signing statement, according to Kid Oakland, a blogger who covered Pelosi’s remarks for the liberal website dailykos.com.

“The president has made excessive use of signing statements and Congress is considering ways to respond to this executive-branch overreaching,” a spokesman for Pelosi, Nadeam Elshami, said. “Whether through the oversight or appropriations process or by enacting new legislation, the Democratic Congress will challenge the president’s non-enforcement of the laws.”

It is a scenario for which few lawmakers have planned. Indicating that he may consider attaching a signing statement to a future supplemental spending measure, Bush last week wrote in his veto message, “This legislation is unconstitutional because it purports to direct the conduct of operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the presidency.”

A lawsuit could be seen as part of the Democrats’ larger political strategy to pressure — through a series of votes on funding the war — congressional Republicans to break with Bush over Iraq.

Democrats floated other ideas during yesterday’s weekly caucus meeting. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) suggested that the House consider a measure to rescind the 2002 authorization for the war in Iraq. Several senators and Democratic presidential candidates recently have proposed that idea.

“There was a ripple around the room” in support of the idea, said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).

In the 1970s, congressional Democrats tried to get the courts to force President Nixon to stop bombing in Cambodia. The courts ruled that dissident lawmakers could not sue solely to obtain outcomes they could not secure in Congress.

In order to hear an argument, a federal court would have to grant what is known as “standing,” meaning that lawmakers would have to show that Bush is willfully ignoring a bill Congress passed and that he signed into law.

The House would have to demonstrate what is called “injury in fact.” A court might accept the case if “it is clear that the legislature has exhausted its ability to do anything more,” a former general counsel to the House of Representatives, Stanley Brand, said.

Lawmakers have tried to sue presidents in the past for taking what they consider to be illegal military action, but courts have rejected such suits.

A law professor at Georgetown Law Center, Nicholas Rosenkranz, said Bush is likely to express his view on the constitutionality of the next supplemental in writing. Whether Bush has leeway to treat any provision of the supplemental as advisory, however, depends on the wording Congress chooses, Rosenkranz added.

Bruce Fein, who was a Justice Department official under President Reagan, said Democrats seeking to challenge a signing statement would have to try to give themselves standing before filing a lawsuit.

“You’d need an authorizing resolution in the House and Senate … to seek a declaratory judgment from the federal district court that the president, by issuing a signing statement, is denying Congress’s obligation to [hold a veto override vote],” Fein said.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) introduced legislation to that end last year, but the idea of a lawsuit has yet to gain traction in Congress.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that “the odds would be good” for a signing statement on the next supplemental, considering that Bush has in the past shown a predilection for excusing his administration from contentious bills. But Levin did not offer any clues as to how Democratic leaders would counter Bush.

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: NOW NANCY’S GONNA SUE THE PRESIDENT!

And over all things — President Bush’s signing statements.

Hey, Nancy, it’s just not all that unusual for presidents to write signing statements when they veto congressional bills. Like the most recent War Spending Package that you guys sent to him that was chock full of little piggy barrel projects for your pet (big donors) constituents.

So, since you’re so vested in freedom of speech as an American virtue, you intend to censor the president and commander-in-chief?

Courts traditionally don’t even hear such nonsensical garbage suits. And what a waste of the taxpayers’ money! In fact, in an article in today’s The Hill written by Jonathan E. Kaplan and Elana Schor, we are reminded that “the courts ruled that dissident lawmakers could not sue solely to obtain outcomes they could not secure in Congress.” The authors were referring to a ruling way back in the 1970s when Congress tried to force President Nixon to stop the bombing in Cambodia.

In other words, Ms. Nancy, if you can’t get a law passed through Congress, you aren’t going to be able to make case law through the judicial system.

Did you completely miss American Government, Social Studies and Civics classes? Since you’re about the same age as I am, Ms. Nancy, it would most likely have been Civics.

Civics is where we learned that there are three branches of the U.S. government. Each branch has certain responsibilities and are accountable to the people of the United States.

If and when Congress passes laws that the president believes are not constitutional, then, yes, he has not only the right to veto the law, but also the responsibility to do so.

If he wants to make a statement as to why he’s vetoing it, then he also has that right. Like in the most recent case, when he said in his signing statement that he was vetoing the law because it was unconstitutional.

But I will give you credit for giving high school and college students some great opportunities to see how governmental offices run and who has what obligations, power and rights.

For instance, there’s going to be one tiny little problem that’s gonna slow you down and that is a two syllable word called standing. In any court proceeding, someone has to have “standing.” That is, someone has to be the injured party who’s looking to the courts for a remedy of some sort.

Somehow, passing a law that’s not constitutional and having the president veto it while telling you why he vetoed it is not exactly an injury, you big bunch of uninjured sore losers.

Now get back to work and do what you were hired to do by the taxpayers!

"Unless basic Law 101 eludes me Ã‚Â… you canÃ‚Â’t sue a standing President."

From the Cornell Law - CRS Annotated Constitution [article II fragment 41]

PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY FROM JUDICIAL DIRECTION

By the decision of the Court in Mississippi v. Johnson, in 1867, the President was placed beyond the reach of judicial direction, either affirmative or restraining, in the exercise of his powers, whether constitutional or statutory, political or otherwise, save perhaps for what must be a small class of powers that are purely ministerial. An application for an injunction to forbid President Johnson to enforce the Reconstruction Acts, on the ground of their unconstitutionality, was answered by Attorney General Stanberg, who argued, inter alia, the absolute immunity of the President from judicial process. The Court refused to permit the filing, using language construable as meaning that the President was not reachable by judicial process but which more fully paraded the horrible consequences were the Court to act. First noting the limited meaning of the term “ministerial,” the Court observed that “[v]ery different is the duty of the President in the exercise of the power to see that the laws are faithfully executed, and among these laws the acts named in the bill. . . . The duty thus imposed on the President is in no just sense ministerial. It is purely executive and political.

“An attempt on the part of the judicial department of the government to enforce the performance of such duties by the President might be justly characterized, in the language of Chief Justice Marshall, as ‘an absurd and excessive extravagance.’

“It is true that in the instance before us the interposition of the court is not sought to enforce action by the Executive under constitutional legislation, but to restrain such action under legislation alleged to be unconstitutional. But we are unable to perceive that this circumstance takes the case out of the general principles which forbid judicial interference with the exercise of Executive discretion.

. . .

“The Congress is the legislative department of the government; the President is the executive department. Neither can be restrained in its action by the judicial department; though the acts of both, when performed, are, in proper cases, subject to its cognizance.

“The impropriety of such interference will be clearly seen upon consideration of its possible consequences.

“Suppose the bill filed and the injunction prayed for allowed. If the President refuse obedience, it is needless to observe that the court is without power to enforce its process. If, on the other hand, the President complies with the order of the court and refuses to execute the acts of Congress, is it not clear that a collision may occur between the executive and legislative departments of the government? May not the House of Representatives impeach the President for such refusal? And in that case could this court interfere, in behalf of the President, thus endangered by compliance with its mandate, and restrain by injunction the Senate of the United States from sitting as a court of impeachment? Would the strange spectacle be offered to the public world of an attempt by this court to arrest proceedings in that court?”

Rare has been the opportunity for the Court to elucidate its opinion in Mississippi v. Johnson, and, in the Watergate tapes case, it held the President amenable to subpoena to produce evidence for use in a criminal case without dealing, except obliquely, with its prior opinion. The President’s counsel had argued the President was immune to judicial process, claiming “that the independence of the Executive Branch within its own sphere . . . insulates a President from a judicial subpoena in an ongoing criminal prosecution, and thereby protects confidential Presidential communications.” However, the Court held, “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high–level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.” The primary constitutional duty of the courts “to do justice in criminal prosecutions” was a critical counterbalance to the claim of presidential immunity and to accept the President’s argument would disturb the separation–of–powers function of achieving “a workable government” as well as “gravely impair the role of the courts under Art. III.”

Present throughout the Watergate crisis, and unresolved by it, was the question of the amenability of the President to criminal prosecution prior to conviction upon impeachment. It was argued that the impeachment clause necessarily required indictment and trial in a criminal proceeding to follow a successful impeachment and that a President in any event was uniquely immune from indictment, and these arguments were advanced as one ground to deny enforcement of the subpoenas running to the President. Assertion of the same argument by Vice President Agnew was controverted by the Government, through the Solicitor General, but, as to the President, it was argued that for a number of constitutional and practical reasons he was not subject to ordinary criminal process.

Finally, most recently, the Court has definitively resolved one of the intertwined issues of presidential accountability. The President is absolutely immune in actions for civil damages for all acts within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties. The Court’s close decision was premised on the President’s “unique position in the constitutional scheme,” that is, it was derived from the Court’s inquiry of a “kind of ‘public policy’ analysis” of the “policies and principles that may be considered implicit in the nature of the President’s office in a system structured to achieve effective government under a constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” While the Constitution expressly afforded Members of Congress immunity in matters arising from “speech or debate,” and while it was silent with respect to presidential immunity, the Court nonetheless considered such immunity “a functionally mandated incident of the President’s unique office, rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history.” Although the Court relied in part upon its previous practice of finding immunity for officers, such as judges, as to whom the Constitution is silent, although a long common–law history exists, and in part upon historical evidence, which it admitted was fragmentary and ambiguous, the Court’s principal focus was upon the fact that the President was distinguishable from all other executive officials. He is charged with a long list of “supervisory and policy responsibilities of utmost discretion and sensitivity,” and diversion of his energies by concerns with private lawsuits would “raise unique risks to the effective functioning of government.” Moreover, the presidential privilege is rooted in the separation–of–powers doctrine, counseling courts to tread carefully before intruding. Some interests are important enough to require judicial action; “merely private suit[s] for damages based on a President’s official acts” do not serve this “broad public interest” necessitating the courts to act. Finally, qualified immunity would not adequately protect the President, because judicial inquiry into a functional analysis of his actions would bring with it the evil immunity was to prevent; absolute immunity was required.

I am sorry that I missed that. I am just beside myself with the way Peloser is acting, I guess I wasn't payin' attention.

You bring up a great point. Take Rudy, please. The media tells us that we need a liberal to beat a liberal. I say horse hockey to that. But a lot of folks here at FR believe it and are going to allow the media to dictate how they will vote. Not me.

I say that we need a strong Conservative who has a proved and trusted record in regards to abortion, guns, and God.

The Republican Party is the last safe haven for the unborn baby. If the Republican Party wishes to leave the unborn babies in the Demorats hands, there will be no one around to see that those babies breath air one day. And that aint abortion, it is murder.

The only thing that gives me comfort is knowing that front runners generally do not win. My promise is to vote my conscience during the Primary. I will not allow the media the ability to dictate my vote.

So far, if I had to vote today, my vote is with Duncan Hunter. Hunter has a A+ NRA rating, he stands strong for life, he has fought to keep God in public view, Hunter stands for securing our border. And a couple more things: Hunter served in one of the most dangerous outfits in Vietnam, the 75th Rangers. Plus his son is in Iraq for a third time.

And last night an Hannity and Commie, I saw Ann Coulter endorse Duncan Hunter. Every time I hear her talk, I want her to carry my children. :-)

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