Host Margot Adler asks Boston Globe Reporter Charlie Savage what presidential signing statements are and how the current administration is using them differently than past administrations.
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Charlie Savage
covers legal affairs and homeland security for the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe. He was born in 1975 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he later earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a master's degree from Yale Law School. Savage is currently on leave writing a book about executive power. It is scheduled to be published by Little Brown in the fall of 2007.
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Former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards and law professor Christopher Schroeder discuss the history of signing statements and debate the constitutional implications of their use.
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Mickey Edwards
is a lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the executive director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. He was a Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma for 16 years (1977-92), during which time he was a member of the House Republican leadership and served on the House Budget and Appropriations committees. He serves on the board for the Constitution Project and is member of the Coalition to Defend Checks and Balances. He has taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and Princeton universities. In addition, he is currently an advisor to the U.S. Department of State and a member of the Princeton Project on National Security.
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Christopher Schroeder
is a professor of law and public policy studies and the director of the Program in Public Law at Duke University. He is also co-chair of the Separation of Powers and Federalism issue group for the American Constitution Society’s Project on the Constitution in the 21st Century. Schroeder has served as deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Along with other former officials of the Office of Legal Counsel, Schroeder authored a statement on presidential signing statements that disagrees with portions of the American Bar Association’s special task force report on the same subject.
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Host Margot Adler speaks with outgoing chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, about the current administration's reliance on signing statements to reinterpret laws passed by Congress.
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Senator Arlen Specter
is Pennsylvania's senior senator. He was elected to the Senate in 1980 and is currently serving his fifth term. In 2005, he became Pennsylvania's longest serving senator. He is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee and the Veterans Affairs Committee. On the Appropriations Committee, Senator Specter also plays a key role as chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, which oversees federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and educational programs like Head Start, Pell grants, and GEAR-UP.
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Host Margot Adler talks to legal scholar Laurence Tribe about signing statements, the Constitution, and what the future holds.
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Laurence Tribe
is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor. He is the author of "American Constitutional Law" (1978), the most frequently cited treatise in that field, and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 36 times.
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