Barr on Signing Statements

Former Attorney General William Barr made the following observation in a speech at Cardozo Law School in 1992:

The use of signing statements to say that agencies should refuse to enforce part of a law because it is unconstitutional has been extremely controversial. Our position, or my position when I was at the Office of Legal Counsel, was that the President could use signing statements in that way where the law encroached on executive authority. For example, a 1990 foreign relations bill had a provision forbidding spending funds on sending a delegation to a negotiating session, unless the delegation included members of the (Congress-controlled) Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Essentially, Congress tried to control the President's appointment power by forcing him to appoint members of a legislative entity to a diplomatic delegation. In our view, that was a clearly unconstitutional encroachment on the President's appointment authority as well as on his authority to administer the foreign relations of the United States. Since the bill contained all of our foreign relations money, we said that the President could sign the bill and at the same time announce that the provision would not be enforced. In fact, that is what was done, and no legislative members were appointed. We said that the power to decline to enforce the law flows from the Take Care Clause - "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed ...." The Constitution is the law. If the President is confronted with a circumstance where the Constitution says one thing and a statute says another, the President or the Attorney General has to choose the supreme law of the land. Particularly where a law encroaches on executive power, the only effective way of challenging the law is by declining to enforce it. Otherwise, the President would be at the mercy of Congress. The only reference to this issue at the Constitutional Convention was by James Wilson, who said that one of the President's defenses to encroachments on presidential power is the President's refusal to execute those unconstitutional parts of the law.