Impeachment call not based in fact

In response to the Aug. 14 letter from David Shroder of Elgin.

I think Shroder needs to do a bit more research before opining with such certitude and vitriol. He stated, as justification for impeaching President Bush, that presidential signing statements are "wholly a creation of the Bush administration."

This is simply untrue, as a 10-second Google search makes evident. The ABA Task Force on this issue documents that "signing statements" can be traced back to James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk and Ulysses Grant. Tyrants all, apparently.

It is also a fact that President Clinton signed many more presidential signing statements than President Bush. Clinton's own White House counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, pointed out that the Department of Justice in three prior administrations had opined that the Constitution provided authority for the president to decline to enforce a clearly unconstitutional law.

Nussbaum's memo can be found on the Web site for the Department of Justice (www.usdoj.gov). My purpose for correcting Shroder is not to support or criticize signing statements and their use by presidents through the years. It is to point out the painfully obvious superficiality of the more rabid critics of the Bush administration.

Wouldn't you think that someone proposing such a radical action -- impeachment of a president during wartime -- would at least have the decency to do a tiny bit of research to make sure their views are based on fact?

Schroder apparently lacks even that small sense of fair play.

Paul Stukel

Geneva