The Harbinger of the Unitary Executive? An Analysis of Presidential Signing Statements from Truman to Carter

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship has focused much attention on presidents' routine exploitation of signing statements since the 1980s to disallow provisions of bills passed by Congress. Much less is known about earlier post–World War II presidents' use of signing statements and what precedents they may have set for their successors. This study takes a sharp focus on the 934 signing statements issued from 1945 to 1980, from Presidents Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter. The analysis classifies these signing statements by policy area and by the type of comments the president made. The results accentuate how the resurgent Congress in the 1970s—including budget reform and challenges to presidential latitude in foreign policy through legislative vetoes—compelled Presidents Gerald Ford and Carter to increasingly use signing statements to nullify legislative provisos. The analysis emphasizes how cycles of congressional change affected earlier presidents' use of signing statements, laying a foundation for their successors' more broad manipulation of this rhetorical instrument to aggrandize executive prerogative.

Framing the Accomplishment: How, and Why, Presidents use the Rhetorical Content in Signing Statements for Strategic Purposes, FDR–Carter

“…The results confirm many of the findings from the previous literature using slightly more nuanced measures (see Conley 2011) and a different timeframe (see Kelley, Marshall, and Watts 2013). This is an important contribution, since the constitutional challenges found in signing statements took such a dramatic shift after the Reagan administration.…”

“…The timeframe of the study is appropriate for three reasons: (1) it enables an exploration of the rhetorical content of signing statements during a period of time when the major focus of the tool was on rhetoric rather than the constitutional challenges to provisions of law that took off as a major focus from the Reagan administration forward (see Evans 2011;Kelley 2003;Kelley and Marshall 2009); (2) the data will help supplement earlier work on the development of signing statements as an important institution for the modern presidency (see Conley 2011Conley , 2013Evans 2012), and (3) it potentially helps to corroborate the findings of previous research on the rhetorical aspects of signing statements (Kelley, Marshall, and Watts 2013) by looking at similar data from an earlier time period. 4 The dataset relies upon the corpus of signing statements available at The American Presidency Project's website at the University of California, Santa Barbara.…”

“…The single-mindedness of research on signing statements has led scholars to underappreciate the fact that the vast majority of signing statements throughout the history of our Republic have not been used for constitutional purposes, but rhetorical ones. This lack of attention is an unfortunate oversight that has only recently caught the attention of scholars (see Conley 2011;Kelley, Marshall, and Watts 2013). This is especially surprising given that research repeatedly reveals that rhetoric plays an important role in modern presidential leadership and potentially power (Barrett 2004;Canes-Wrone 2006;Cohen 1995;Kernell 1986;Medhurst 1996;Parry-Giles 2002;Ryan 1988;Tulis 1987).…”

The Politics of Credit in Presidential Signing Statements

“…With a few important exceptions (Conley 2011;Evans 2014;Kelley, Marshall, and Watts 2013), the rhetorical purposes and implications of the signing statement have largely been ignored. 3 Some scholars view signing statements through the lens of a larger interbranch dialogue (Korzi 2011;Ostrander and Sievert 2013a) as opposed to a harsher form of unilateralism that is primarily designed to make tangible shifts in policy outcomes towards the president.…”

“…previous research reveals that they are used for the purpose of claiming and attributing credit (e.g., Conley 2011;Evans 2014;Kelley et al 2013;);…”