Spiiderweb™: Spreading Rot

Monday, February 20, 2006

Spreading Rot

This story is a few days old, but doesn't seem to get any traction. This is how a democracy begins to rot. A little here, a little there and pretty soon you have a rancid government.

It seems a typo caused the House and Senate to vote into law two slightly different versions of the new budget bill. Under the Constitution, the versions must be exactly the same.

Last Monday, Alabama Republican activist and lawyer Jim Zeigler announced that he had filed a lawsuit asking that the act be declared unconstitutional because the versions of the bill approved by the House and Senate are different.

(snip)

"An eighth grader in civics class knows that a bill cannot become law unless the identical bill passes the House and Senate and is signed by the president," Zeigler said in a statement announcing the suit. "Congressmen did not read the bill, and they made a serious, foolish mistake. The Senate bill says patients dependent on medical equipment such as oxygen get to live for 13 months. The House bill says they get to live 36 months."

Zeigler says "gets to live" because the bill limits Medicare payments for medical equipment rentals to 36 months in the House version (the error) and 13 months in the corrected Senate version.

So the Senate came up with the bright idea to just ignore the Constition and send the bill to shrub.

After news of the purported error became public, the Senate approved a resolution correcting the problem that was subsequently refused by House democrats who want a new vote on the entire legislation.

Do I have this right? The people who make our laws don't give a rat's ass about the Constitution? They violate the Constitution by taking away the House's right to re-vote. Now everyone is usurping power.

(read more)

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...: Not so...it's far worse than you think.

Rep. Hastert (R, IL) was personally responsible for the typo. As of today, it has been revealed that the Whitehouse had been informed of the typo but that Bush signed it any way. It has futher been revealed that Bush used a new "power" he is creating called a "signatory letter". Basically, he wrote a little note on the bill that said "This is the correct amount because I say it is" and signed it.

Now, it is likely this will go to the Supreme Court. Due to precendence first set in an 1876 supreme Court case, the court has decided that it cannot judge a matter if it would lead to proving that there is a conspiracy in Congress to enact illegal legislation. What this means is that since this would have had to be done via conspiracy that the Supreme Court will rubber stamp this law passage as, well, lawful, and then a signatory letter will become defacto Constitutional law.

At that point, we are effectively in a complete dictatorship run by Executive Orders and Signatory Law, just what Bush, Cheney and Allito want.; 3/25/2006 03:05:00 AM
SPIIDERWEB™ said...: hopeseekr of xmule,

Jesus I hope you are wrong.

I quote from findlaw.com.

"When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed."

These signing statements aren't new, but no president before has abused them by stating interpretation of a law as being the opposite of its intent.

Regardless, the affect is the same. Bush can legislate with such signing statements.; 3/25/2006 07:55:00 AM