Arlen Specter — a Republican! — plans to have a bill ready by the end of the week granting Congress the right to sue the President!

Can you believe it’s come to this? Well, that’s what you get, I suppose, for taking all of the meaning out of the Constitutional processes by impeaching a President for getting a blow job. You see, all they accomplished with the Lewinsky scandal was making it utterly meaningless to impeach anyone ever again. Well, at least if he’s a Republican…

So here’s the scoop, in case you’re living with rats in a hole in Iraq, unaware of anything going on in the world right now. In his sixth year as President of the United States, George W. Bush has finally used his first veto. Why is that? I’m glad you asked…

You see, President Bush didn’t veto anything because he was abusing a little loophole called a signing statement. While signing a bill into law, the President would write a long, complicated signing statement, absolving himself and his administration from having to follow that law. Therefore, it never mattered what he signed into law, because he didn’t have to worry about following it.

There are no provisions in the Constitution, no federal statutes, and no common-law principles that explicitly permit or prohibit the use of signing statements. They are simply the practice by which Presidents have followed the instruction of Article II, Section 3, requiring the executive to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed".

President Bush has signed over 800 bills into law, while writing detailed signing statements making sure they will never apply to him and his administration. Of course this is completely unconstitutional. Every time he doesn’t follow a new law, he is not protected by some Executive power… but rather he is willfully breaking the law.

Now it’s just a shame that Congress has to grant themselves the authority to sue him. And what happens when he signs their bill, and uses a signing statement to protect himself from the very suit they wish to bring?