[Promise to uphold the Constitution] Signing statements ... nullifying the law in about 30 percent of cases ... e.g. torture law

Revealed: Bush's Presidential Signing Statements Have Been Used to Nullify Laws | By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium. Posted June 18, 2007
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Well, it's official: President Bush doesn't much respect the laws Congress passes. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report -- commissioned by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and released today -- confirms that Bush's use of presidential signing statements are, in fact, utterly without precedent.
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Though the GAO report makes no claims about the legitimacy of Bush's statements or of the use of statements in general, it indicates that, in practice, the statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases. The issues are important: They include accounting for Iraq war funding and security measures for the border patrol.
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The report was conducted fairly simply. GAO officials surveyed 19 of last year's 160 objections to determine how the statements had impacted the implementation of laws. According to the report: "We contacted the relevant agencies and asked them how they were executing the provisions. After evaluating the responses we received, we determined that agencies failed to execute six provisions as enacted."

Alongside the failures of law, the reports also list the rationales that the president used to strike down the provisions. For instance, GAO found that, by citing the Unitary Executive Theory, Bush allowed the Department of Defense to exclude "costs for any other contingency operations, such as those in Iraq" as Congress had mandated.

Indeed, it's the Unitary Executive Theory -- another Constitutionally dubious concept -- that has made Bush's use of signing statements especially damaging. Last year, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inserted a provision into the Department of Defense emergency supplemental bill that would have criminalized the use of torture by U.S. military interrogators. In order to protect the measure's effectiveness, McCain included a provision that aimed to stop all interference by the President, save for a veto of the entire package. "The provisions of this section," it read, "shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section."

But upon signing the law, President Bush declared his intent to interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power." ...