My congratulations to Charlie Savage who cornered the market on the "presidential signing statements" story and did a really awesome job of reporting it throughout 2006. I can't wait to see the book he's apparently away writing right now.
Also worth reminding all and sundry that this was a story that first bubbled up from the blogosphere, and more on that after the jump.
The average reporter was too busy saluting Senator John McCain for getting President Bush to sign a deeply flawed piece of anti-torture legislation, and completely missed that late on a Friday afternoon, President George W. Bush had signed the bill in invisible ink by saying his executive power was not in any way constrained by the legislation he had just agreed to.
But on Monday, Jan. 2, 2006, Marty Lederman, law blogger, Georgetown professor, and brilliant mind, wrote about it at Jack Balkin's blawg, Balkinization.
You can see Professor Lederman's fingerprints on this Pulitzer Award. The Boston Globe article on Wed. Jan. 4, 2006, cites him as an expert on the subject. It was Savage's first story on the subject.
''The whole point of the McCain Amendment was to close every loophole," said Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice Department from 1997 to 2002. ''The president has re-opened the loophole by asserting the constitutional authority to act in violation of the statute where it would assist in the war on terrorism."
Also of note, Eric Umansky, who used to write Slate's "Today's Papers" column, on Jan. 3, 2006, at his private blog first pointed to a political science study on the subject of presidential signing statements.
So, congratulations to Savage, but also to bloggers everywhere who keep uncovering muck that the rest of us journalists miss.