Over at Balkinization, Larry Tribe on Signing Statements. Here's a taste:
Most fundamentally, it seems to me an exercise in shooting at phantoms to focus on presidential signing statements themselves and to highlight the increasingly frequent practice of "using" such statements to "challenge laws" (to quote from Charlie Savage in Saturday's Boston Globe) as though anyone really imagines that the mere fact of a formally worded presidential reservation about a statute, contained in a signing statement rather than in a veto message, would have some operative legal effect in any way analogous to that of an item veto or would even be given weight by a court in later deciding what to make of the law in question. The analogy to the plainly unconstitutional line item veto, of the sort the Supreme Court struck down in Clinton v. New York, thus fails entirely.
This seems right to me.
