Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Day: April 13, 2007”

DeFazio says, updated

April 13, 2007

For those tracking prospects of a Senate candidacy by Representative Peter DeFazio, a relatively detailed report today in the Roseburg News-Review.

Short version: Speaking to that city's Rotary Club and elsewhere, DeFazio sounds thoroughly uninterested in a Senate run and indicates that he's kept the door open a crack only because so many people (in Congress and in Oregon) have asked him to run.

Pertinent slice: "DeFazio said he has already told the party leadership twice he doesn’t plan to run for Smith’s position, but he said they wouldn’t take 'no' for an answer. 'I told them I would wait a while until I told them ‘no’ again,' he said."

Losing Uncle Sam at Chehalis

April 13, 2007

The Uncle Sam billboard so familiar to I-5 travelers near Chehalis, a signpost of conservative thinking for many years, has been one of the places west of the Cascades that reliably has had the back of President George W. Bush.

So today we were stunned to see this on the board: "Where does it say anything about signing statements in the Constitution?"

The query admits to more than one possible interpretation. But on its face, it seems to side with the Bush critics who have argued that the hundreds of signing statements Bush has attached to bills - thereby declaring that acts of Congress mean whatever he wants them to mean - are an unconstitutional expansion of presidential power.

If Bush has lost the Uncle Sam billboard at Chehalis, truly he has nothing left.