Ending back-door vetoes

OVER THE LAST five years, congressional leaders have barely squawked as President Bush signed bills -- and then quietly but explicitly declared his intention to discount key provisions of them. He has attached such statements to more than 800 laws, at last count. Left unchallenged, the president's so-called ``signing statements" would represent a unilateral change to the structure of the US government, a change that no one outside the White House played any role in enacting.

Yesterday, a bipartisan task force of the American Bar Association concluded that these statements violate the constitutional separation of powers. And the panel called for federal legislation that would allow for judicial review of any statement in which the president claims the authority to disregard all or part of a law.

The bar association's House of Delegates has yet to vote on the recommendations, but endorsing them should be virtually automatic for a group of lawyers. Whether the White House or congressional leaders will act on the proposal is another story. For decades, presidents asked the bar association, which represents the nation's lawyers, to evaluate the credentials of judicial nominees, but the current President Bush put an end to that practice. His administration treats the bar association as just another interest group, to be humored or ignored as he pleases.

But the task force has a point. Bush has employed signing statements more often and more aggressively than any of his predecessors, as the Globe's Charlie Savage documented in a series of articles this spring. The laws in question touch on fundamental values, such as whether US military interrogators should be allowed to torture detainees.

The administration's defenders say the president is merely objecting to unconstitutional provisions -- specifically, ones that infringe on the rightful powers of the executive -- within otherwise desirable legislation. But even if the Bush administration were correct on that point, back-door vetoes only relieve Congress of its obligation to make laws that are constitutional. The task force notes that deciding constitutionality is up to the federal courts. ``The Constitution is not what the President says it is," the panel's report declares.

Congress was right to prohibit the use of torture by American interrogators. If the president opposed that ban, he had the right to veto it. That, of course, would have looked bad, both at home and around the world. But while a veto-by-signing-statement might have been more convenient politically, no part of the Constitution gives the president the right to have it both ways -- to enforce parts of laws that magnify the power of the executive branch and then ignore the rest.