Laying Landmines

by digby

Dday wrote about Bush pulling out his trusty pen earlier today and issuing yet another signing statement, this time saying the congress has no right to tell the president he can’t build permanent bases in Iraq. A reader reminded me that Bush was a busy unitary boy today. He was also issuing executive orders about what the congress is and isn’t allowed to appropriate money for:

As legislators and federal officials prepared to leave town for the Christmas recess last month, Congress hurriedly passed a massive 3,400-page spending bill to keep the government running for the next fiscal year. Tucked inside the report language of the omnibus bill, and not technically bound by the force of law, were nearly 9,000 congressional earmarks worth an estimated $7.5 billion.

Fiscal conservatives and government watchdogs immediately urged President Bush to remove funding for the pet projects, while some high-ranking lawmakers warned the White House to steer clear of the legislative branch’s appropriations process. On Monday night, Bush offered a compromise to both constituencies and appeased neither.

The Congressional Research Service concluded in December that the president had the legal authority to eliminate all earmarks that appear in committee reports or managers statements.

But Brian Riedl, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said the president may have feared that such a tactic would be viewed as “declaring war” on Congress and that compromise was his only option.

[…]

Meanwhile, avoiding a presidential veto for proposing too many earmarks may be as simple as appropriators sitting on their hands for a few extra months. The majority leaders in the House and Senate could delay passing spending bills — possibly funding the government through a temporary continuing resolution — if the they believe a Democrat will be occupying the White House in 2009. In that case, it would be up to the next president to decide whether to honor the executive order.

So this is a landmine set to explode in the next administration. (Expect a lot of these. What else does Bush have to do with his time right now?)

The truth is that a line-item veto has been found to be unconstitutional, and the only thing that allows him to do this is a technical loophole (which the article shows can be very easily circumvented.) This is for show.

It helps sell the astonishing hypocritical Republican line that the Democrats are creating earmarks at an unprecedented clip, which they are going to use in this campaign, but more importantly, against the next congress and administration. (Just because they couldn’t plan for the occupation of Iraq doesn’t mean they can’t plan when it really matters to them.)

While Bush has chided Democrats for failing to reach his goals, some critics see a level of hypocrisy in the president’s message. Lilly said Bush allowed earmarks to soar when Republicans controlled the Congress but discovered his sense of fiscal discipline only after Democrats took over last year.

“This president has the worst record of any president in history in terms of permitting an explosion of earmarks,” Lilly said. “Very few people that have the record that he has would have the brass to try and pull this off. But I don’t think he can … It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”

Let’s hope the Democrats aren’t laughing. They’d better figure out a way to deal with this because if they don’t they’re going to be wearing earmarks around their necks once they have a majority and a Democratic president.

Here’s the reaction in the press from earlier today:

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The American people expect there to be transparency in the process. They expect the people to be — here in Washington to be wise about how they spend their money. And this executive order will go a long way toward sending that signal to the Congress and at the same time earning the trust of the American people. So, Mr. Director, thank you for your leadership on this issue. It’s the right course of action to take and I am proud to have signed the executive order…

PHILLIPS: And hopefully protect the American taxpayers from government spending on wasteful earmarks.

No word on why he waited seven years to do it.

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