Conservatives who spent the Clinton years complaining about a lack of respect for the rule of law may want to have a careful look at the lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of Ari Zivotofsky, a Brooklyn-born man who now lives in Israel. The 2002 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, signed into law by President Bush, included language inserted by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York, that said, “For purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.”

But Ari Zivotofsky says his baby Menachem’s American passport was marked only “Jerusalem,”not what he and his wife had requested, “Jerusalem, Israel.” So he’s suing the Secretary of State Powell in federal district court for the District of Columbia. The suit seeks to force the State Department to follow the law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush.

We’ve generally believed such matters ought to be up to the president rather than the Congress. But if President Bush had wanted to veto the law on constitutional grounds, he could have. He could have then proceeded to do the right thing and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by executive order or by moving the American embassy there from Tel Aviv, as the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 requires and as he promised to do during his campaign. Signing the law and then flouting it is a bad idea, not only for those of us who care about sending the right signal to Israel and the terrorists who are attacking its capital, but to everyone who cares about the broader principle that the president and his state secretary are bound to faithfully execute the laws of this country. If the lawsuit can throw that issue into sharp relief, the Zivotofsky family and its lawyers will be doing the nation a service not only to Israel but to America as well.