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First up, Jack Cafferty doesn't hold back in his recent comments on Pelosi's "sleezy" plan for passing Obamacare.
(H/T Newsbusters)
As I blogged here, the Slaughter the Constitution plan is unconstitutional becasue it violates the express terms of Art. I Sec. 7. That section that require that a bill "pass" both houses and the vote on the bill be "entered" into a journal. Neo-Neocon has much more.
Then there is this from Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner, discussing a Court action brought against Republicans in 2005 when they used a mirror of the Slaughter plan to approve an increase in the national debt. Public Citzen filed the Court case:
Here's the argument they made:
"Article I of the United States Constitution requires that before proposed legislation may "become[] a Law," U.S. CONST. art. I, § 7, cl. 2, "(1) a bill containing its exact text [must be] approved by a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives; (2) the Senate [must] approve[] precisely the same text; and (3) that text [must be] signed into law by the President," Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 448, 118 S.Ct. 2091, 141 L.Ed.2d 393 (1998).
"Public Citizen, a not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization, filed suit in District Court claiming that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Pub.L. No. 109-171, 120 Stat. 4 (2006) ("DRA" or "Act"), is invalid because the bill that was presented to the President did not first pass both chambers of Congress in the exact same form. In particular, Public Citizen contends that the statute's enactment did not comport with the bicameral passage requirement of Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, because the version of the legislation that was presented to the House contained a clerk's error with respect to one term, so the House and Senate voted on slightly different versions of the bill and the President signed the version passed by the Senate.
"Public Citizen asserts that it is irrelevant that the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate both signed a version of the proposed legislation identical to the version signed by the President. Nor does it matter, Public Citizen argues, that the congressional leaders' signatures attest that indistinguishable legislative text passed both houses." (Emphasis added)It's important to be clear that the issue before the court was whether a minor text correction was sufficient to satisfy the constitutional requirement that both chambers of Congress must pass the exact same bill. In this 2005 case, the court ruled the minor correction was acceptable.
The deeming of an entire bill to have been passed without a prior recorded vote goes far beyond a minor text correction, so the constitutional principle clearly would be violated by the Slaughter Solution.
And now for the kicker, guess who joined Public Citizen in that suit with amicus briefs:
Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and Louise Slaughter
Heh. And hey, they got it right. My question, why isn't John Boehner passing out copies of this brief to every reporter in the WH Press Room?
