Yes, noxious things indeed emanate out of the slaughterhouse of the constitution, Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter's (NY-28) Rules Committee [(202) 225-3615]. Do you remember the speech code she "updated" to protect the current president from hurtful epithets from the House floor?
Despite the code, people defiantly think their thoughts anyway, say about how Obama hides behind that woman's skirts. Or about how his subsequent indecorous remarks to the Supreme Court before Congress assembled just prove that he's a hypocrite himself when it comes to decorum, in addition to being a liar on healthcare. Read Paragraph 25 "References to Executive Officials" for yourself here and a summary here with video of the Rep. Wilson incident. Louise Slaughter is all about limiting free speech, to protect her man.
And now this tyrant of a woman is trying to slaughter the constitution itself by dispensing with the requirement to vote on legislation and send it to the president. In short she is in revolt against Article I, Section 7 of the constitution. But it's not just her in revolt. She's doing this for Obama, whom she serves. The truth is that it is Obama who is in revolt against the constitution. He's just organizing the Washington community to pull it off.
If the Senate healthcare bill is to become law as the president wants (after all he's a creature of the Senate, isn't he?), the constitution requires that "the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively." There are not enough votes in the House to pass the bill which passed in the Senate. So Slaughter instead wants the House to deem that this has already occurred in both Houses when it has in fact occurred in only one. It's like a lawyer stipulating to certain facts, except in this case there is no real fact in the House, only the desire, which the wrath of constituencies back home has up to this point thwarted from expressing itself successfully.
In other words, Slaughter wants the House to vote for something entirely new, something which pretends the Senate healthcare bill has already passed in the House when it has not. There will be no yeas and Nays recorded for the Senate healthcare bill as such anywhere except where they have been recorded already, in the Senate, and therefore there will be no healthcare legislation per se to send on to the president. All they will have is a Senate healthcare bill which has in fact stalled in the House, and what amounts to a new "let's pretend" bill.
Secondly (and this point is crucial but not at all appreciated so far) since no bill from the Senate will in fact have been passed in the House, if the House passes a bill which merely assumes that the Senate healthcare bill is passed and sends that on to the president for signature, the House will be guilty of violating the constitution because it did not first send it to the Senate to have the "let's pretend" bill ratified there, which it must also do, according to the constitution. Bills must have yeas and Nays recorded from both chambers, remember? In other words, the House is about to circumvent the constitution by by-passing the Senate and sending the "let's pretend" bill directly to the president, asserting, in desperation, that it has Senate approval by incorporation.
In effect the House leadership is playing a game of chicken with the Senate, knowing that because the executive branch has got their back, the Senate can do nothing and can be hung out to dry. There is no mechanism by which the Senate may intrude itself anymore since sending their bill to the House. The filibuster would only be a threat if a bill came back to the Senate, which explains why everything is happening the way it is happening: A bill must by all means be prevented from returning to the Senate, where it will die a death by a thousand cuts. The only mechanism which the Senate might naturally rely upon now in the event of House misbehavior would be the presidential veto, but the president is not going to veto the "let's pretend" bill. The president is conspiring with the House to get such a bill, and there is nothing the Senate can do about that anymore. And in point of fact, the majority in the Senate will be happy to see their bill become the law, despite the lawlessness that made it happen. A concluding note of irony might be that President Obama might delay his vacation until the "let's pretend" bill is presented to him, and then leave for ten days without signing the bill.
If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) [another federal accommodation of religion!] after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it . . ..
(Article I. Section 7.)
He could always claim he never signed the bill, just as the cowardly representatives in the House will claim, too. Those six little words, "as if he had signed it," at once the inspiration perhaps for the whole effort at "deeming," and for avoiding responsibility for the effort at the same time, used against the will of the American people.
It remains to be seen if Americans will just sit by and watch America burn to the ground like Dresden did in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. I fully expect them to. They voted for this guy. They do not want to think that Slaughter and the Left in this country are attempting a coup. They resemble no one so much as Billy Pilgrim, whose response to everything, good or evil, was "so it goes." At least a few people seem concerned, but not enough as Anthony Dick notes here. One can only hope that patriots in the House, if there are any left, will see Slaughter's Solution for what Dick rightly says it is: subterfuge. I'll call it by its other name: treason against the United States. Expelling Louise Slaughter, as Mark Levin calls for, doesn't begin to go far enough. Louise Slaughter should be arrested and put on trial. Tomorrow.
