The president's critics haven't been shy about making statements of their own. Consider the intemperate claims made by the ABA's president accusing Mr. Bush of undermining the rule of law, violating the Constitution, challenging the separation of powers, upsetting the checks and balances of the American system, and cheating at craps. (Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the general tone of the ABA's scattershot blast.)

Some of us are so old we can actually remember a time when the American Bar Association was a respected, nonpartisan professional organization with no political axes to grind. These days it seems to do little but.

So what course does the president of the American Bar Association recommend in response to the signing statements that this president (and his predecessors) have issued? Would he bar a president of the United States from making such statements?

Goodness. That sounds very much like a gag order. Are the president's arguments so strong that Sen. Specter and the leadership of the ABA can think of no better response than censorship? To paraphrase Ring Lardner: Shut up, they explain.

Any political remedy that involves preventing someone with an unwelcome opinion from expressing it sounds worse than the disease. Even if that someone is the president of the United States and he's signing a bill into law at the time.

If, instead of vetoing a disagreeable bill, a president chooses to sign it into law for reasons of his own, like agreeing with some of it, then why not let him express his reservations? And leave any disputes over interpretation to the courts. Isn't that what the rule of law is about?

Anyway, what more does Congress want? It already gets to write the law itself.

His critics certainly have a point when they say the president doesn't determine what the Constitution says, but neither does Congress or the ABA.