The Legal Significance of Presidential Signing Statements
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Steven G. Calabresi
Presidents have issued signing statements when signing bills into law since the first half of the Nineteenth Century but recently this practice has come under attack. In this short essay, we argue that presidential signing statements ought to be given legal weight for three reasons. First, they are part of a federal statute's legislative history because the president's concurrence is ordinarily necessary, along with the House and Senate's, for a bill to become law. Second, presidential signing statements are deserving of Chevron deference because of the President's constitutionally specified expertise as the chief executor of federal law. And, finally, presidential signing statements are a vital mechanism by which the President as the nation's unitary head of the executive branch can control exercises of the executive power by his millions of subordinates. For all three of these reasons, presidential signing statements are legally binding on subordinate executive branch personnel and they also ought to be given legal weight by federal and state courts.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Using the Generic Vote to Forecast the 2006 House and Senate Elections
- The 2.4% Solution: What Makes a Mandate?
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- Signing Statements: What to Do?
- The Legal Significance of Presidential Signing Statements
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Black Politics, the GOP Southern Strategy, and the Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act
- Forecasting the 2006 National Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives
- Using the Generic Vote to Forecast the 2006 House and Senate Elections
- The 2.4% Solution: What Makes a Mandate?
- The Validity of the 2004 "Moral Values" Question
- Feast or Famine at the Federal Luau? Understanding Net Federal Spending under Bush
- Signing Statements: What to Do?
- The Legal Significance of Presidential Signing Statements
- Review
- Review of The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South
- Race for the Key to Explaining Partisan Realignment in the American South: Thoughts on Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism
