Florida voters won’t consider constitutional amendments aimed at instituting public school vouchers this fall. The Florida Supreme Court said in a one-page ruling that the proposed amendments would not be on the November ballot. The New York Times reports that the court will issue a full opinion later. A coalition of public interest groups challenged the amendments’ placement on the fall ballot and during a hearing on the lawsuit several of the Florida Supreme Court justices questioned whether the amendments were misleading. The two amendments were crafted and promoted by the Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, which included several members of former Gov. Jeb Bush's administration. Bush’s statewide voucher program has fared poorly in the state courts. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court invalidated the voucher program, saying it subverted the Florida Constitution’s mandate to provide a uniform system of free public schools.  

by Ellen Dannin, Fannie Weiss Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson School of Law, University Park, Pennsylvania

When the cherry blossoms bloom each spring, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which assists the President in preparing the federal budget and oversees and coordinates the Administration's procurement policies, releases a sunny report on the large amounts of money taxpayers have saved as a result of the government’s privatization initiatives. Only a careful reader would notice that all the purported savings are not fact; they are projections. And those projections stretch credibility while ignoring costs associated with privatization.

University of Kentucky journalists were released earlier today from a St.Paul, Minn., jail, The Courier-Journal, a Louisville, Ky., daily, reported. Three photographers associated with the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, Kentucky Kernel, were arrested yesterday outside the Xcel Center for allegedly rioting. The student newspaper’s editor, Brad Luttrell, told The Courier-Journal that the photographers were not on assignment for the newspaper, but were there to document protests taking place during the Republican National Convention. He added that the students had press passes visible in an effort to avoid being tagged as protestors. “We knew the police would be out in force,” Luttrell said. “We talked about how to be careful. We know photographers can get arrested.” No formal charges have been lodged against the three, Kentucky Kernel photography adviser James Winn, a University of Kentucky sophomore Britney McIntosh and senior Edward Matthews. According to The New York Times more than 250 arrests have been made in St. Paul related to the protests.

ACS is pleased to invite lawyers and law students to participate in the second year of ACS ResearchLink, an innovative online resource that collects legal research topics submitted by public interest practitioners for law students writing faculty-supervised law review/journal notes, seminar papers or independent study/dissertations for academic credit.  Practitioners receive a copy of the resulting student papers.  ACS will publish approved papers in a searchable online eLibrary.  

Public interest lawyers with interesting topics they wish they had time to research fully, who welcome national exposure for their organizations and issues, and like the idea of making legal scholarship more practical while supporting law students interested in social justice can submit topic ideas by completing a simple form (it takes about 20 minutes once you have your idea).

Law students looking for real-world legal research topics that help public interest lawyers, who are interested in potential publication opportunities, and want opportunities to build relationships with practitioners can search for research topics here.

by Barry D. Roseman, partner at the Denver-based law practice of McNamara, Roseman, Martínez & Kazmierski

In an Issue Brief published by The American Constitution Society For Law and Policy (ACS), I explore the history of the rule of at-will employment, the common-law and statutory exceptions to that rule, the grossly unfair results that flow from that rule and arguments for and against it. This issue is especially timely now, since the November ballot in Colorado will contain a proposed state constitutional amendment that would abolish the at-will employment rule in that state.

The United States is the only advanced industrial country that does not require employers to have just cause to terminate the employment of non-unionized employees. One of the arguments for retaining the at-will employment rule is an economic one, that requiring just cause would increase unemployment rates and reduce the rate of job growth. 

I have examined the unemployment and job-growth rates for Montana, the only state with a just-cause statute. The Montana legislature enacted that statute in 1987, in response to decisions by the Montana Supreme Court that held that all employees, even probationary ones, were covered by the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Those employees could recover tort relief, including punitive damages, for an unfair dismissal.

My analysis compares the Montana rates not only with those of the country as a whole, but also with those of the neighboring states of Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. I have looked at the rates before Montana extended the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing to employees, after it adopted that implied covenant and after it enacted the Montana Wrongful Discharge Act (MWDA).

A Minnesota high school must provide a student-organized gay rights club the same access to school resources as other student groups, a federal appeals court has ruled. Since 2005, students of a group called Straights and Gays for Equality (SAGE) have fought school district officials for equal status. The group, formed at the Maple Grove High School, has sought use of the school’s PA system, bulletin boards and the ability to meet during school hours like other school-recognized student groups.

In 2007, a U.S. District Judge said the school officials had violated the Equal Access Act by denying SAGE the same benefits as they provided other student-run groups. The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal district judge’s ruling late last week. The appeals court in SAGE v. Osseo Area Schools concluded that the school district “does not prohibit SAGE from meeting at the school or utilizing some avenues of communication, but it limits SAGE’s access to communication avenues and meeting times and places. Curricular groups receive more extensive use of school communication avenues.” Therefore, the appeals court held the issue was not whether school officials were providing SAGE “some” access to school communication resources, “but whether it provides equal access to available avenues of communication as provided to other noncurriculum related groups. We hold that it does not.”

The Star Tribune, a Minneapolis-St.Paul daily, reported that Osseo Area school district officials have not decided whether to appeal the Eight Circuit’s ruling.


 

Is the Harrold public school board in Texas on to something? Will its decision to allow public school teachers to carry guns to work spark a nationwide trend? In a front-page article today, The New York Times reports that the school board’s decision has drawn nationwide attention, “rattled some people and sparked fiery debate.” The school district’s superintendent, David Thweatt, told the newspaper that the policy of allowing teachers to pack heat was based on real threats and the fact that the sheriff’s department is 17 miles away from the school district. “I’m not exactly paranoid,” said Thweatt. “I like to consider myself prepared.” He also said that many of the district’s teachers had received 40 hours of weapon training from a private group he would not identify.

Some are questioning the legality of the policy. Although Texas bars guns on public school property, its laws provide an exception for school boards to allow people to carry concealed weapons on the property. But the gun laws, as the Times notes, specify that those allowed to carry the arms must be “commissioned peace officers.” Brian Siebel, a lawyer with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, tagged the Harrold school board’s policy as “unwise” and potentially an “illegal one.”

Animal sacrifice for religious purposes may not be unconstitutional and may be protected by the First Amendment, but that doesn’t mean it’s a practice safe from laws aimed at preventing cruelty to animals. If the animal cruelty laws are not purposefully designed to suppress the religion known as Santeria or other religions where animal sacrifice is a ritual, then practitioners may still find themselves answerable to those laws.

For example, a situation noted on the Religion Clause Blog, Santeria worshippers are facing multiple charges over the improper treatment of animals in New York and New Jersey. Perez-Hernandez and his son Louis were charged with violating animal cruelty statutes because, according to a police investigation, the animals died from malnutrition. The two also face charges for unlawfully transporting more than 100 animals from a New Jersey farm without proper documents, the Lower Hudson Journal News reported. Authorities told the newspaper that the two were not being prosecuted because of their planned sacrifice of the animals in a religious ritual, but for violating Agriculture and Market laws that prohibit denying sustenance to the animals. In addition, the two were charged with subverting a town law against harboring farm animals in residential neighborhoods.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted the largest single-workplace immigration raid in United States history at the Howard Industries facility in Laurel, Miss., reports The Associated Press. Officials arrested 595 workers suspected of being illegal immigrants.

With immigration reform efforts stalled in Congress, many states have passed their own enforcement laws. Mississippi recently enacted legislation with severe penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants. Under the new statute, employers who hire illegal immigrants could lose their right to conduct business in the state for as long as one year and lose their public contracts for up to three years.

ACS has sponsored several panel discussions about immigration law and the legal status of immigrants in the United States  At the 2008 ACS National Convention, panelists including Eleanor Acer from Human Rights First and Jonathan Smith of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia explored immigrants’ right to counsel. Video of the panel is available here.

At the 2007 ACS National Convention, participants including Esther Olavarria from Senator Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) office and Ana Avendaño of the AFL-CIO discussed comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Click here for a video of the panel discussion. Also at the 2007 convention, Judges Martha S. Berzon of the Ninth Circuit, Karen Nelson Moore of the Sixth Circuit, Rosemary Pooler of the Second Circuit, Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit and Chief Judge Paul R. Michel of the Federal Circuit discussed the adjudication of immigration appeals in the federal court system. Video of the panel is available here.

Lily Ledbetter, a leading voice for pay equity in America, addressed the DNC Convention in Denver last night, sounding a call for a nation committed “to fairness and equality.” Ledbetter, a former Goodyear Tire Company worker who led a legal challenge against the company charging it with paying her less than her male co-workers, introduced herself to conventioneers as a “grandmother from Alabama” honored to address the national audience on Women’s Equality Day. Ledbetter told the attendees that the “the fight for equality if not over,” citing her legal fight with Goodyear as an example. Ledbetter’s legal challenged ended in defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court with a ruling that sided with Goodyear. The high court concluded that Ledbetter’s lawsuit was not timely enough.

“My job demanded a lot, and I gave it 100 percent,” Ledbetter told the Convention. “I kept up with every one of my male co-workers. But toward the end of my 19 years at Goodyear, I began to suspect that I wasn’t getting paid as much as men doing the same job.” When Ledbetter sued the company, a jury agreed with her with discrimination claim. “But they [Goodyear] appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court, and in a 5-4 decision our highest court sided with big business,” she said. A transcript of Ledbetter’s speech is here.

Also, addressing last night’s gathering in Denver, Mass. Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D), and a former member of the ACS Board of Directors, described his hardscrabble upbringing in Chicago and his commitment to fighting poverty and for providing equally opportunity for all Americans.  

Additional analysis of the Justice Department reports that uncovered political considerations for non-political jobs within the Department, reveals that more of the politically appointed immigration judges have “disproportionately” rejected immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. According to further study of the two DOJ reports, which are available here and here, sixteen immigration judges chosen because of their conservative affiliations “as a group ruled against asylum-seekers significantly more often than colleagues who were appointed, as the law requires, under politically neutral rules.” Bruce Einhorn, a law professor at Pepperdine University, told The New York Times that the immigration court “is now the seat of individuals who were appointed illegally, and that means that in the minds of many people the court symbolizes illegality.”

The reports from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) revealed that top aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used political criteria in seeking to fill non-political positions within the Justice Department. The first report, issued June 24, showed that candidates for nonpolitical jobs and internships were rejected because of their affiliations with progressive organizations, including the American Constitution Society. ACS Executive Director Lisa Brown responded to the Justice Department hiring controversy in a special video message available here and in a commentary for TPM Café, which is available here. For more ACS coverage of the DOJ hiring controversy, see blog posts here and here.

Lilly Ledbetter, the plaintiff in one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s high-profile employment law decisions from its 2006 - 07 term, will take her case to conventioneers in Denver this evening. The high court in a 5-4 ruling narrowly construed employment discrimination law in dismissing Ledbetter’s lawsuit against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear concluded that Ledbetter’s lawsuit was untimely. As noted by Tony Mauro for The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times, Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for more than a decade before discovering the disparity in pay with her male counterparts. Mauro added that Ledbetter’s appearance before the Democratic convention “will raise the Supreme Court as a campaign issue." (See DNC Convention schedule here.)

In featured remarks before the 2008 ACS National Convention in June, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) tagged the Ledbetter decision as among the Roberts Court’s most disturbing decisions. Video of Leahy’s remarks is available here.  Additional ACS analysis of the Ledbetter case is available in guest ACSBlog posts from Catherine Fisk, a Duke University professor of law, and Fatima Goss Graves, of the National Women’s Law Center. Also watch panel discussions on employment law cases, including Ledbetter, from the 2008 ACS National Convention here and here.

Also, check out a scheduled speech today from Mass. Gov. Deval L. Patrick, a former member of the ACS Board of Directors.

On the remote possibility that some conventioneers and convention viewers are too eager for the speechifying to kick off in Denver, check out video of speeches from ACS National Conventions. Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), just announced as Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) running mate, gave a keynote address to the 2005 ACS National Convention. Video of Biden’s address is here. Also Eric Holder Jr., former Deputy Attorney General, who served on Obama’s vice-presidential search team, addressed this year’s ACS National Convention. Watch Holder’s address here.   

by Kevin Lanigan, Director of the Law and Security Program, Human Rights First.

[Editor’s note: Human Right’s First recently released a report entitled “How to Close Guantanamo: A Blueprint for the Next Administration”]

The Bush Administration’s decision to send its “Global War on Terror” prisoners to detention camps at Guantánamo Bay was driven in large part by a desire to insulate their interrogation, imprisonment and trial from judicial scrutiny and the rule of law.  That goal was illegitimate and unworthy of the United States, and the Supreme Court has rejected the Administration’s policies on Guantánamo each time it has examined them.  

Far from making the United States more secure, these policies have actually undermined our national security. The Administration’s attempt to create a “law free zone” at Guantánamo – where prisoners are subjected to detention, interrogation and trial practices that violate basic norms of human dignity and fundamental fairness – has provided America’s enemies with an easy recruiting tool, severely impaired counterterrorism cooperation with our allies, and failed to bring truly dangerous terrorists to justice.

There appears now to be perhaps as much consensus as American politics ever achieves around the proposition that “Guantánamo should be closed.” Secretary of State Rice, Secretary of Defense Gates and President Bush all have said they would like to close Guantánamo. And the next president – whoever he is – has pledged to do so: Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama have acknowledged the damage to America done by Guantánamo, and each has vowed to close the detention facility as an early step toward repairing our reputation as a nation committed to human rights and the rule of law.

But as the current Administration has shown, it’s easy to talk about wanting to close Guantánamo. The hard part is in the doing. And a critical foundation of that hard part is defining what it really means to “close Guantánamo.”

Despite federal court rulings that prohibit public school officials from organizing religious activities in the public schools, some high school football coaches in South Carolina believe they are exempt, according to this article from the Morning News, a Florence, S.C. daily. Wilson High School football coach Darryl Page told the newspaper that he’s aware of court rulings that prohibit organized prayer at public schools and that he tries to adhere to them. “If you look at the history of Wilson High School, it was established as a Freedman’s Bureau School,” he said. “This school has survived World Wars and segregation and throughout it all, it has kept its identity. From my perspective, how could all that happen if God didn’t have his hands on it? There’s no way. We still pray before games. It’s strictly an option with every player.”

The Morning News article, also noted several private schools in the area where prayer is pervasive, noting that those schools are not bound by the First Amendment principle of the separation of church and state.

Earlier in the year, a federal appeals court ruled that a public high school football coach in New Jersey could not constitutionally participate in prayer activities with his players. One of the attorneys who argued the case on behalf of the school district’s ban on praying with students, Richard Katskee, wrote about the ruling in a guest post for the ACSBlog.  

by Simon Heller, Legal Director, Alliance for Justice

Alliance for Justice recently released its nine month report on Michael Mukasey’s tenure as attorney general. In the report, we outlined his management of the Justice Department, including concerns over his close ties to the Bush administration. When Mr. Mukasey was confirmed by the Senate last December, many people hoped that he would usher in a new era at the Department, returning a sense of independence and respect for the rule of law. Unfortunately, the last nine months have done little to distinguish him from his immediate predecessors.

The U.S. Department of Justice is proposing changes to intelligence gathering policies that would make it easier for federal investigators to acquire information on Americans. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said he expected criticism of the rule changes because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection in the United States," McClatchy-Tribune reports. According to Mukasey, federal agents will be given more latitude to conduct surveillance and also will be permitted to search more databases than allowed previously in criminal cases. A former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU told the news service that the proposed rules would weaken restrictions put on domestic spying following the Watergate scandal.

The U.S. Justice Department may seek indictments against some of the guards employed by Blackwater Worldwide who were involved in killing 17 Iraqi civilians last year. The Washington Post reports that the Department has sent so-called target letters to six Blackwater security guards, providing them a chance to rebut evidence of wrongdoing. The Blackwater guards were contractors hired by the U.S. State Department to protect diplomats.

A discussion of whether the legal academy is sufficiently preparing students to meet their duty to serve the public in times of crisis by Douglas Colbert, professor of law, University of Maryland School of Law, and a Board member of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT).

An argument in favor of a policy facilitating post-conviction DNA testing for defendants claiming innocence by John F. Terzano, President of The Justice Project.

A critical look at the United State’s policy of exporting electrical and electronic waste by Daniella Gayapersad-Chan, a member of the Board of Directors for the Disaster Accountability Project and President of Howard Public Interest Law Society.

An overview of Osama bin Laden’s alleged media director Hamza Ahmed’s boycott of his military commission trial and an update on the proceedings of his military commission trial of Mohammed Jawad , by Nicole Barrett, a Human Rights First volunteer consultant and former trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

A summary of a federal appeals court ruling on a Tennessee public school’s ban on students wearing clothing with the Confederate flag.

A recap of California Supreme Court’s findings in case over health care professionals’ refusals to provide medical services to lesbians and gay men.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) has launched an educational Web page on student voting rights. The Web resource offers access to a voting guide for students, general information about voter registration and more. As The New York Times editorial board noted, “Vote suppression is alive and well – and this time, students are among the main victims. College students, who are legally entitled to vote where they attend school, are sometimes barred or frightened away from doing so by local officials who want to keep a tight grip on political power.” The ACS Resources on Student Voting is an easy place for students to learn about their rights. Check it out here.

A former Department of Justice official, whose critics charge has pushed policy to limit voting rights, is going to work as a “consultant and temporary full-time employee,” for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reports TPM Muckraker.

As Dahlia Lithwick reported in Slate last September, Hans von Spakovsky’s tenure at the DOJ was marked by several civil-rights related controversies. He led the fight within the Civil Rights Division to approve the 2003 Texas redistricting plan, which the Supreme Court later found violated sections of the Voting Rights Act. He blocked a 2004 investigation into potential violations of Native Americans’ voting rights by the state of Minnesota, the LA Times reported. 

According to The Washington Post, he played a leading role in the Justice Department’s approval of Georgia’s voter identification law, over the objections of career attorneys at the DOJ who feared that the measure would disproportionately harm minority voters. Earlier that year, he authored an anonymous law review article in support of the measure before it was submitted to the DOJ for review, prompting widespread outcry from voting rights advocacy organizations. Spakovsky, The New Yorker reported, has also argued that state election officials should pursue aggressive campaigns to “purge” the voting rolls of felons.

For almost two-and-a-half years, the Senate held-up Spakovsky’s nomination to the Federal Election Commission, until he withdrew last May, citing financial pressures in a letter to President George W. Bush. In opposing the nomination, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) warned that Spakovsky’s appointment “could potentially turn back the clock on 50 years of progress in voting rights.”   Six former career DOJ attorneys also urged the Senate to reject the nomination, stating in a letter to the Rules Committee, that Spakovsky played a leading role in steering  the Civil Rights Division “from its historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.”

by Douglas L. Colbert, professor of law, University of Maryland School of Law, and a Board Member of the Society Of American Law Teachers (SALT)

Are we in the legal academy doing enough to instill within our students a true understanding of their core ethical and professional obligation "as a public citizen having special responsibility to the quality of justice," described in the first sentence of the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct? Specifically, I question the extent to which we as legal educators are teaching and instilling students to fulfill their pro bono duty "to provide legal services to those unable to pay." (See Model Rule 6.1)  

My idea for this project grew from two catastrophic events: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Although individual attorneys stepped forward to assist the many people affected by 9/11, they represented only a small fraction of the New York and New Jersey bars. With regard to Katrina, the response is even more disturbing. Again, some lawyers volunteered to help New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents. However, the overwhelming number of attorneys chose not to. Thus, to cite one example of the consequences of lawyers' passivity, the New Orleans criminal courthouse remained closed for ten months, leaving thousands of people awaiting trial in jail and without access to court or to counsel.   

In response to Katrina's devastation, more than four thousand law students traveled to the Gulf Coast states during their school recesses between December, 2005 and spring, 2007 to lend assistance and create a national organization, the Student Hurricane Network (SHN). On several occasions, I accompanied and supervised Maryland law students as they entered Louisiana jails and interviewed these individuals for the first time since their arrests. Most students had just completed their first semester of law school. Afterwards, they asked: "Where are the lawyers? If we could do this with so little experience, why had so few attorneys volunteered?" 

In a narrowly crafted opinion, a federal appeals court upheld a Tennessee public school’s ban on students wearing clothing with the Confederate flag. The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Barr v. Lafon concluded that school officials were justified in banning the divisive symbol. The appeals court said it found that the “school’s dress code as applied to ban the Confederate flag is constitutional because of the disruptive potential of the flag in a school where racial tension is high and serious racially motivated incidents, such as physical altercations or threats of violence, have occurred.” The appeals court cautioned in its Aug. 20 decision, however, “that our decision today does not establish a precedent justifying a school’s ban on student speech merely because other students find that speech offensive.”

In 2005, William Blount High School Principal Steven Lafon told an assembly of freshmen that “they would not be allowed to have Rebel flags or symbols of [the] Rebel flag on their clothing, or anything else that was a disruption to the school.” Lafon testified that the policy was aimed at curbing racial tensions at the Blount County school. For example, in spring 2005, the county’s deputy sheriff investigated racist graffiti in one of the school’s restrooms. One image included a drawing of a noose next to a Confederate flag.

Several students, intent on challenging the dress code, wore clothing with the flag. One student donned a T-shirt in fall 2005 bearing the Confederate flag, a picture of two dogs and the words “Guarding our Southern Heritage.” The students subsequently challenged the dress code ban as a violation of their free speech and other constitutional rights. Citing federal court precedent the Sixth Circuit found that “First Amendment standards applicable to student speech in public schools, however, are unique, and courts accord more weight in the school setting to the educational authority of the school in attending to all students’ psychological and developmental needs.”  

by John F. Terzano, President of The Justice Project, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase fairness and accuracy in the criminal justice system, with a focus on the capital punishment system

Last week, The Justice Project released Increasing Access to Post-Conviction DNA Testing: A Policy Review. This policy review explains the problems surrounding post-conviction DNA testing policies and procedures and identifies the best practices for states to adopt to ensure that post-conviction DNA testing contributes to a more accurate criminal justice system and restores public confidence in the system's ability to correct its own errors.

To date, more than 200 people -- including 16 who were sentenced to death -- have been proven innocent by DNA testing. In many of those cases, the same DNA test helped bring the real perpetrators to justice.

A new report from the U.S. House Armed Services Committee blasted President George W. Bush’s use of presidential signing statements as infringing on congressional oversight of national defense policy. Steven Aftergood reported on the Armed Services document for Secrecy News. The committee’s report concluded that the president’s signing statements have too often failed to provide specific objections to legislation. “The functionality of a signing statement is greatly reduced if it is too vague to identify the concerns of the President and the interpretation of the law that the President is trying to convey to the executive branch,” the committee report stated. The report noted that presidential signing statements can be used to proper effect, but that “signing statements may be a mechanism to expand executive authority at the expense of the legislature.”

Charlie Savage reported earlier this year for the Boston Globe on Bush’s assertion, made in a signing statement, that the president has the power to bypass provisions of laws passed by Congress.

Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University College of Law, helped create a comprehensive index of the president’s signing statements issued between 2001 – 2007. The document, available here, provides the provisions of legislation the administration tried to flag as objectionable. For more analysis of the administration’s use of signing statements, see Kinkopf’s ACS Issue Brief called “Signing Statements and the President’s Authority to Refuse to Enforce the Law.”