BUSH PASSES PATRIOT ACT ON HIS OWN

Remember my [http://thepete.com/think-the-torture-ban-passed-it-didnt-if-youre-bush/|post on how Bush used signing statements to qualify the torture ban effectively negating any good the anti-torture law could do]? Yeah, well, Bush has done it again with the new abridged version of the Patriot Act. The following comes from [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/1450205|a transcript] of the DemocracyNow.Org [http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20060327|podcast from March 27, 2006] :

the Bush team has never vetoed a single bill in the five years he’s been president now. Instead, they’ve used these signing statements to say that ‘we will take, you know, the bits that we want and ignore the other parts.’ And no one has been used to looking at these things.

So, Bush issued this signing statement on the PATRIOT Act on March 9th, the same day that he signed the bill. But it went almost unnoticed. There were a few legal specialist blogs that sort of took note of it in a wry way. I wrote this article that came out in Friday's paper. And there was a huge response, as people realized what he had done again. But that was the first time in the mainstream media, at least, that it's received any kind of attention.

Oh, this is getting so OLD... how much of this do we have to sit through before someone in DC decides to enforce the law???