Presidential Signing Statements

Should the President Have the Last Word?

September 29, 2006, 9:00am – 10:30am

About This Event

Presidential signing statements, once a largely ceremonial instrument used to express a president’s views on legislation, have become in recent years a means by which the president can sign a bill while stating his intention to decline to enforce it, in whole or in part. Last April, Charlie Savage reported in The Boston Globe that President Bush had issued signing statements purporting to disregard over 750 legal provisions—more than all of his predecessors combined. This revelation has sparked a fierce debate. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the practice and bills have been introduced that would limit its use. The Constitution Project issued a bipartisan report expressing concern and the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted a formal policy opposing the misuse of signing statements as contrary to the rule of law and the system of separation of powers.

In response, some former executive branch officials of both parties have argued that the president must be able to decline to enforce laws that he regards as plainly unconstitutional and that the use of signing statements for this purpose is constitutionally permissible.

Is this use of signing statements consistent with the Constitution? What is its effect on the system of checks and balances? What are the consequences of its use—or abuse? Please join the Center for American Progress and a distinguished bipartisan panel of experts, including two members of the ABA Taskforce on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine and a prominent critic of their report in a discussion of these issues and more.

Friday, September 29
Program: 9:00 A.M. to 10:30 A.M.
Admission is free

Center for American Progress
1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Map and Directions

Featured Panelists:
Mark Agrast, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Walter Dellinger, Douglas B. Maggs Professor of Law at Duke University, former Solicitor General
Mickey Edwards, lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership, Former Representative (R-OK)

Location

Center for American Progress
1333 H St. NW
Washington, DC 20005

Biographies

Walter Dellinger is the Douglas B. Maggs Professor of Law at Duke University. He returned to Duke in August 1997 after having served as acting Solicitor General for the 1996-97 term of the Supreme Court. Dellinger argued nine cases before the Court, the most by any Solicitor General in more than twenty years.

After serving in early 1993 in the White House as an advisor to the president on constitutional issues, Dellinger was nominated by President Clinton to be Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and was confirmed by the Senate for that position in October 1993. During his three years as Assistant Attorney General he served as the Department's principal legal advisor to the Attorney General and the President.

Professor Dellinger has published articles on constitutional issues for scholarly journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Duke Law Journal and has written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The New Republic and The London Times. He spent 1988-89 as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He has been a member of the Board of Editors of The American Prospect and a member of the Executive Committee of the Yale Law School Association.

He has testified more than twenty-five times before committees of the Congress, including the Senate Budget Committee, the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Mickey Edwards is the director of the Aspen Institute's Rodel Public Leadership Program and a lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He served as a member of Congress for 16 years, during which time he was a member of the House Republican leadership (chairman of the Republican Policy Committee), a member of the House Appropriations and Budget Committees, and the ranking member of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee. After leaving Congress, he taught government and public policy at Harvard for 11 years before joining the Princeton faculty in 2004. He has also taught at the Harvard Law School and is a visiting professor at Georgetown University.

He became director of the Aspen Institute's leadership program for elected officials in January of 2005. He has also been an advisor to the State Department and is a director of the Constitution Project.

Edwards has been a columnist for a number of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Examiner, and Miami Herald, and broadcasts a weekly political commentary on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." His articles have also appeared frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Boston Herald, Tulsa World and other major newspapers, and in such publications as The National Interest, The Public Interest, and Policy Review. He is the author of two books, co-author of a third, has contributed chapters to several more, and is under contract for a forthcoming book on Congress. He has chaired task forces on foreign policy for the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations and is a director of many organizations in the fields of public policy and foreign affairs. Congressman Edwards has degrees in both Journalism and Law. He served as a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine.

Mark Agrast is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining the Center for American Progress, Mr. Agrast was Counsel and Legislative Director to Congressman William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts (1997-2003). He previously served as a top aide to Massachusetts Congressman Gerry E. Studds (1992-97) and practiced international law with the Washington office of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue (1985-91). During his years on Capitol Hill, Mr. Agrast played a prominent role in shaping laws on civil and constitutional rights, terrorism and civil liberties, criminal justice, patent and copyright law, antitrust, and other matters within the jurisdiction of the House Committee on the Judiciary. He was also responsible for legal issues within the jurisdiction of the House International Relations Committee, including the implementation of international agreements on human rights, intercountry adoption, and the protection of intellectual property rights.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he received his B.A. summa cum laude from Case Western Reserve University in 1978, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar from 1978-81, and received his J.D. in 1985 from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of International Law and Co-Founder/Director of the Allard K. Lowenstein Clinical Program in International Human Rights Law. He is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and is admitted to practice in Ohio and the District of Columbia.

Agrast has been a leader in a number of professional and civic organizations, including the American Bar Association, in which he serves on the 37-member Board of Governors. He is a past chair of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and represents the section on the Executive Board of the ABA Center for Human Rights. He was elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2001 and served as a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine.