According to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman, a “bipartisan group of senators and scholars,” in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, “denounced President Bush yesterday for using scores of ‘signing statements’ to reserve the right to ignore or reinterpret provisions of measures that he has signed into law.”

Let’s see now. Only one of the legal scholars who testified, Harvard’s Charles Ogletree, is quoted in the story. Ogletree’s prepared testimony is much more equivocal and cautious than the portrait Weisman gives of it. Of the four non-governmental witnesses whose prepared testimony is posted at the Committee’s website, two of them (Nicholas Rosenkranz of Georgetown and Christopher Yoo of Vanderbilt and Penn) strongly support the position of the Bush administration, and only Bruce Fein (of the Washington Times and private practice) strongly opposes it. The only support you would know about from Weisman’s story is from the administration’s own witness, Deputy Assistant AG Michelle Boardman of the Office of Legal Counsel.

Weisman also manages to distort the administration’s position, since neither the president nor anyone in his administration has claimed a “right to ignore or reinterpret” statutes he has signed. (And what would “reinterpret” mean in this context anyway?)

Other than these small flaws, there’s nothing wrong with Weisman’s reporting! But readers actually interested in the arguments can go to the Committee site linked above. I think they’ll find that Bruce Fein is the lonely witness out on a slender limb, held up only by the incompetent reporting of the Washington Post.