Last Friday, Federal District Judge John D. Bates conducted yet another feeble judicial capitulation to the Bush Administration when he ruled that it was acceptable for the president to sign a bill that had not been passed by Congress.
As many BuzzFlash readers may recall, a clerical error created a $2 billion discrepancy between two versions of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which each respectively passed the House and Senate by the slimmest of margins. The mistake was quickly identified, but Bush rushed to sign the stingier copy - which cut two years off of Medicare coverage for certain medical equipment - despite being warned in advance that the bill he was about to approve had only been voted on by one half of Congress.
As we have previously noted about this story, the Constitution is pretty clear on how a bill becomes a law, and that's not it. If a teenager wrote a paper advocating this process in civics class, he or she would receive a failing grade. Nevertheless, Bush's lawyers are fervently trying to defend this fatuity instead of simply admitting for once that the president messed up.
Hey, when you've gone through the trouble of putting jurists like Judge Bates on the bench, why not?
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