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Originally Posted by smooth
the_jazz, as a policy matter, the executive branch may do the things you're discussing, but they don't get to create legislation and render constitutional decisions about their actions that are binding. and this is exactly dksuddeth's point: that the executive branch can create [legitimately] policy/law in face of congressional proceedings via "signing statements" and that the president, through his sole discretion, can act or not act based on his view of the constitutionality of a piece of legislation. that's not true either.
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Now I see where we might be misunderstanding each other. I don't believe that I ever said that the president could CREATE legislation, but that he could determine which laws to enforce and not enforce based on his own interpretation of that law being constitutional or unconstitutional. If I inadvertently misled anyone in to believing that I said the president can make laws, my apologies, for I most certainly did not mean for that to come across.
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Originally Posted by smooth
two problems with what's going on here: 1) there isn't any constitutional basis for the president to interpret constitionality of laws and selectively apply them and 2) if that were the case, then we would already have had a police state since the government's inception
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If the executive refuses to enforce a law, who's going to enforce it?
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"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
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