Constitution? What Constitution?

I'd intended to write more about the Bhutto assassination tonight, although I barely expected to touch on the how it will likely affect the Iowa caucuses--plenty of other commentators seem to have that covered (from what I can tell, their consensus is that it will help Hillary, McCain, and Giuliani, unless it doesn't). But I came across this little tidbit on Daily Kos and found it fascinating. Just in case you don't click through, essentially it says that the Prez has announced that he's going to veto the "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008."

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog points out that White House opposition only arose after the bill cleared Congress, but what I find fascinating is the potential confrontation the Prez is setting up. According to the White House statement, he's not actually vetoing it, he's using the "pocket veto," something that is available to the executive if Congress passes a bill and then goes out of session. Since there's no active Congress to which the bill can be vetoed and returned, the bill gets killed simply by the executive doing nothing (I'm using executive rather than president because many governors have this power, as well). That's all well and good, except for the fact that the Senate has not gone out of session. In order to keep the Prez from making recess appointments of nominees for judgeships or other offices who couldn't achieve Senate approval, Harry Reid has kept the Senate open in pro forma sessions (here's the definition of pro forma session from the Senate Website; just for good measure, here's the definition of pocket veto, too). If the Senate's open, Bush's pocket veto is impotent. So will the bill become law? Who's going to make sure it does? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? While they've been ready to talk a good game against the Prez, I'm not sure they're ready to push back in this kind of manner. (And I'm not exactly sure what kind of power they have to push back. If you get this kind of impasse, who decides whether something is a law or not? Do the requisite enforcement agencies just start to enforce it or not?) Even though the Bush administration is pushing back against the Senate, don't expect anyone to start making recess appointments. The Prez's MO seems to be to establish the precedent this time, and when no one in the Senate says anything, he'll wait until the next recess that's thwarted by pro forma sessions to act on it. If this becomes an actual issue, I'll be very pleasantly surprised, but I'm not counting on it.