[eDebate] all star ABA legal team to carve way to bush impeachment

[Jake Stromboli]

contact conyers and tell him to link H RES 635 or any reappearce therof to 
the findings of the ABA team (without this impeachment hysterical crazy 
neocons will complete orchestration of dictatorship):
John.Conyers at mail.house.gov

2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax

2615 W. Jefferson
Trenton, MI 48183
(734) 675-4084
(734) 675-4218 Fax

669 Federal Building
231 W. Lafayette
Detroit, MI 48226
(313) 961-5670
(313) 226-2085 Fax

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/06/04/bar_group_will_review_bushs_legal_challenges/

Bar group will review Bush's legal challenges


By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  June 4, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted 
unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his 
constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws 
that have been enacted since he took office.
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Meeting in New Orleans, the board of governors for the world's largest 
association of legal professionals approved the creation of an all-star 
legal panel with a number of members from both political parties.

They include a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI 
director, and several prominent scholars -- to evaluate Bush's assertions 
that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation 
of the Constitution.

Bush has appended statements to new laws when he signs them, noting which 
provisions he believes interfere with his powers.

Among the laws Bush has challenged are the ban on torturing detainees, 
oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and ``whistle-blower" 
protections for federal employees.

GLOBE ARCHIVES: Bush challenges hundreds of laws (4/30)

The challenges also have included safeguards against political interference 
in taxpayer-funded research.

Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined.

The ABA's president, Michael Greco, said in an interview that he proposed 
the task force because he believes the scope and aggressiveness of Bush's 
signing statements may raise serious constitutional concerns. He said the 
ABA, which has more than 400,000 members, has a duty to speak out about such 
legal issues to the public, the courts, and Congress.

``The American Bar Association feels a very serious obligation to ensure 
that when there are legal issues that affect the American people, the ABA 
adopts a policy regarding such issues and then speaks out about it," Greco 
said. ``In this instance, the president's practice of attaching signing 
statements to laws squarely presents a constitutional issue about the 
separation of powers among the three branches."

The signing statements task force, which was recruited by Greco, a longtime 
Boston lawyer who served on former Governor William F. Weld's Judicial 
Nominating Council, includes several Republicans. Among them are Mickey 
Edwards , a former Oklahoma representative from 1977 to 1993, and Bruce Fein 
, a Justice Department official under President Reagan.

In interviews, several of the panel members said they were going into the 
project with an open mind, but they expressed concerns about Bush's actions.

``I think one of the most critical issues in the country right now is the 
extent to which the White House has tried to expand its powers and basically 
tried to cut the legislative branch out of its own constitutionally equal 
role, and the signing statements are a particularly egregious example of 
that," Edwards said. ``I've been doing a lot of speaking and writing about 
this, and when the ABA said they were looking to take a position on signing 
statements, I said that's serious because those people carry a lot of 
weight.

Page 2 of 2 --

William Sessions , a retired federal judge who was the director of the FBI 
under both Reagan and President George H.W. Bush , said he agreed to 
participate because he believed that the signing statements raise a 
``serious problem" for the American constitutional system.

``I think it's very important for the people of the United States to have 
trust and reliance that the president is not going around the law," Sessions 
said. ``The importance of it speaks for itself."

Another member, Patricia Wald, is a retired chief judge of the US Court of 
Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Carter.

She said she had monitored the use of signing statements by previous 
administrations, but ``the accelerated use in recent years presents a real 
question about separation of powers and checks and balances."

Wald also said she was especially interested in studying how signing 
statements affect the federal bureaucracy. As a judge, Wald said, she dealt 
with many cases involving challenges to decisions made by administrative 
agencies. She said that courts are deferential to such decisions because 
they are supposed to be made by objective specialists in the agencies. But a 
heavy use of signing statements could call that assumption into question.


 GLOBE ARCHIVES: Bush challenges hundreds of laws (4/30)


``If Congress passes a law telling the people in the bureaucracy that `this 
is what you should do,' and the president signs it but attaches a statement 
saying `I don't want you to do it,' how is that going to affect the 
motivation of the bureaucracy?" she said.

The task force also includes several prominent legal scholars, such as 
Harold Koh , dean of Yale Law School and a former official in the Reagan and 
Clinton administrations; Kathleen Sullivan , former dean of Stanford Law 
School; Charles Ogletree , a Harvard law professor; and Stephen Saltzburg , 
a professor at George Washington University Law School.

Saltzburg -- who was a Justice Department official under Reagan and the 
first president Bush, as well as a prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal -- 
said he did not believe that signing statements were unconstitutional.

But, he said, frequent use of them could create bad perceptions about 
whether the US government obeys the rule of law.

``The president can say anything he wants when he signs a bill," Saltzburg 
said. ``[But] what does it say about respect for the Constitution and for 
the notion of checks and balances to have the president repeatedly claim the 
authority not to obey statutes, which he is signing into law?"

Rounding out the panel are Mark Agrast , a former legislative counsel for 
Representative William D. Delahunt , Democrat of Quincy, and Thomas Susman, 
who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under both 
Presidents Johnson and Nixon , and was later counsel to the Senate Judiciary 
Committee.

Susman said he agreed to serve out of intellectual curiosity: ``I think it's 
a fascinating subject," he said. The task force is chaired by Neal Sonnett , 
a former federal prosecutor. Earlier this year, Sonnett chaired a similar 
ABA panel of bipartisan specialists who studied the legality of Bush's 
warrantless spying program.

The earlier panel unanimously concluded that Bush should obey a law 
requiring warrants for such surveillance, or he should ask Congress to 
change the law, rather than simply ignoring it.

In February, the ABA House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to endorse the 
surveillance task force's recommendations, enabling Greco to testify about 
the program before Congress.

Sonnett said he planned to run the task force in a similar fashion. The 
group will discuss the issues in telephone conference calls. They will also 
divide up issues to research for the report that will accompany any of their 
recommendations, circulating drafts until they reach a consensus.

The task force will make its recommendation this summer, Greco said, and the 
550-member ABA House of Delegates will vote on whether to adopt its findings 
at a meeting in August.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, Republican of 
Pennsylvania, promised to hold a hearing on Bush's use of signing 
statements.

Specter pledged the action after an article in The Boston Globe described 
the scope and details of Bush's assertions concerning the laws in them.

Greco and Sonnett also said the Globe's coverage of signing statements had 
persuaded them to launch the task force .

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

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