Reply #17: That Was Indeed My Reference, Sir

[The Magistrate]

They are not easy to explain; nonesense never is.

There is absolutely no Constitutional warrant whatever for "signing statements" as legal items.

They seem to be a fruit of this evil tree, "unitary executive", and to sprout from the most foul branch of it, treating the title "Commander in Chief" as granting extraordinary power in time of war. But of course we are not at war; that requires a declaration of a state of war by the Congress, and a mere delegation of authority to the Executive under the War Powers act to decide to commit the armed forces of the nation to combat pending notice to the Congress does not suffice as a substitute for declaration of a state of war.

As near as can be made out, the idea behind all this is that as "Commander in Chief", a President can disregard law he views as interfering with his command of the armed forces, and these "signing statements" serve as notice he intends to do so in a particular instance. Of course, this not only requires assent to the previously referenced fiction we are at war, but also requires assent to the further fiction that every official and employee of the Executive is part of the armed forces of the nation.

The founders of our nation, who wrote the Constitution, certainly envisioned or intended no such thing. Endowing the Presidency with the title of Commander in Chief was meant merely to ensure the armed forces remained unbreakably under the control of the civilian government. It would never have crossed the minds of any of those men met at Philadelphia that they were endowing the Chief Executive with the power claimed today. And let us be quite clear what that proclaimed power is: it is the claim that as chief of the military arm, the Executive has the right to set aside all other branches of the government, or, in other words, it is the claim that the office of Executive contains the power to wield the armed forces of the nation against the Congress and the Judiciary, and also against the governments of the several sovereign States, and set them aside in what can only be phrased with clarity as a military coup.

The words Hatch has uttered here mean, in fact, that he as a Senator has acquiesced to the transformation of the Presidency to a Monarchy, and accepts a future of dictatorship for the United States of America. That is not the act of a patriotic citizen; it is rather the act of a cowardly traitor.

"Treason doth never prosper, what's the Reason? Why, when it prosper, Sir, none dare call it Treason!"