Reports yesterday indicated that the Senate Parliamentarian “ruled” that the President must sign the Senate passed version of Obamacare before the Senate can act on a reconciliation measure. This ruling would have blown up plans in the House to use a very complicated procedure to pass both a Senate passed health care reform bill and a reconciliation measure to make change to the bill all at once. This scenario would have allowed the House to avoid a vote on the Senate passed Obamacare bill and they could have avoided the filibuster rule in the Senate (see Health Care Nuclear Option). The liberals are intent on passing Obamacare at any cost.
Reports have come out today that the Parliamentarian has not ruled that the President must sign a law before it is considered a law for reconciliation purposes. First, they came up with a strategy to get Obamacare passed in the House without the House ever voting on the bill, now they have come up with a strategy and a ruling to get the Obamacare bill to qualify as law without the President signing the law. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid should not support efforts to violate the clear words of the Constitution to pass Obamacare.
The Constitution says that:
Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law.
Just to restate a shocking development in the Obamacare debate; Congressional leaders have found a way to ignore the Constitutional requirement that a law be signed by the President before it is considered a law. Outrage is not a strong enough word for the feelings many American’s have toward elites in Washington, D.C. who will do anything to pass Obamacare.
According to Politico:
Senate Republicans caused a major stir Thursday when they told reporters that the parliamentarian had informed them that the Senate bill needed to be signed into law before lawmakers took up a sidecar bill to fix it. And Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told his Democratic colleagues during a caucus meeting Thursday that he had heard the same thing.
That was yesterday and today is very different. Now the Parliamentarian is backing away from that ruling according to unnamed sources:
But according to reporting by POLITICO’s David Rogers, the accounts aren’t accurate and misconstrue what the Senate parliamentarians have said. That is that reconciliation must amend law but this could be done without the Senate bill being enacted first. “It is wholly possible to create law and qualify law before the law is on the books,” said one person familiar with situation.
A law is not a law until it is signed by the President according to the United States Constitution. You can’t create “law and qualify law before the law is on the books.” The great irony is that there are no “books” other than the U.S. Code which is a compilation of laws. The moment the President signs a bill, it becomes law. This is true legislative activism to claim that reconciliation can amend a law that is not a law.
More from Politico:
For example, if the big bill itself amends some Social Security statute, reconciliation could be written to do the same –with changes sought by the House. Then if reconciliation is passed and signed by President Barack Obama after he signs the larger bill, the changes made in reconciliation would prevail.
This jives with what Pulse sources were saying soon after the first wave of stories hit – in essence, don’t take the reported parliamentarian’s declaration to the bank.
According to this scenario, if the President promises to sign reconciliation after he signs the bill, then the Constitution does not matter. A law is defined as a bill promised to be signed into law by the President. But this conflicts with the left’s the strategy to pass Obamacare:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other House leaders have come up with a plan to package the Senate passed ObamaCare bill and the House reconciliation measure into one package. The House rules committee will report out a rule that will allow the Senate passed ObamaCare bill to pass the House without a vote. The rule will be self-executing in the sense that the House will have been deemed to pass the Senate ObamaCare bill if the House can muster the votes to pass the reconciliation measure. Now the House has used this unethical procedure in the past during a debate on funding the Global War on Terror and in passing debt limit increases under the “Gephardt Rule.”
This is a true outrage and we as a nation should not tolerate such strong arm tactic to pass legislation in an unconstitutional manner.
I have been deluged lately with requests asking me whether one has to answer all of the questions on the 2010 Census, particularly those about race and ethnic background. Like Mark Krikorian, I don’t like those questions and don’t think the U.S. government should be collecting that information — its only use is to continue to separate us on racial grounds, for reapportionment purposes and for certain government programs.
Mark has said that he is going to answer “American” on the race question. I have always been tempted to answer “Native American,” since I was born and raised here. However, people need to understand that they may incur a legal liability if they use such answers or don’t answer questions at all.
In Article I, Section 2, the Constitution says that an “Enumeration” must be conducted every ten years “in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct.” Congress has directed through a federal law that anyone who “refuses or willfully neglects…to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions” on the Census form can be fined $100 (13 U.S.C. § 221). If you deliberately give a false answer, you can be fined up to $500.
Although there are not a lot of reported prosecutions, this statutory requirement has been upheld by the courts as constitutional. There is even a 1970 court decision from Delaware holding that there is a separate violation for each question you don’t answer. So, on this year’s ten-question Census form, you could be fined as much $1,000 — $5,000 if you refuse to answer or deliberately give false answers. If there was a mass refusal by millions of Americans to answer parts of the form — like the race question — the U.S. Justice Department would not have the resources to prosecute everyone who violated the law. But you could be prosecuted and fined, and there is a court decision from New York (which the Supreme Court refused to review) holding that a conviction for violating this law is valid even if there were other persons who also refused to fill out the form but were not prosecuted. (One curious exception to that: The liberal Ninth Circuit reversed a conviction when it was shown that the defendant might have been targeted due to his publicly held “dissident” view that the Census is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.)
Everyone should realize that if you don’t complete a Census form, you are violating federal law. The chances of actual prosecution may be remote, but it could happen. The only real answer to this problem is for Congress to prohibit the Census Bureau from collecting such information and to make all government programs (and the reapportionment process) explicitly race-neutral.