Slaughtered

“In THAT direction,” the Cheshire Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like. They're both mad.”

“But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”

“How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here.”

Maybe that explains it. To be a Democrat congressman, ignoring the polls and your constituents’ wishes, knowing that every Representative and a third of the Senate will face their electors this fall, you must, as the Cheshire Cat said, be mad – or you wouldn’t have come to congress.

We’ve seen this week a political Wonderland being played out where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are and where a healthcare bill is so toxic that “lawmakers” will resort to pretend that they aren’t voting for it by … voting for it.

That is precisely what New York Democrat Louse Slaughter, the Chair of the House Rules Committee, has hatched in the eponymous rule that comically describes the political slaughter that awaits the ovine House members who intend to use it. But the House Dems are determined to march on – for many of them, to their doom in November. One House member – Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN) – who chose to retire rather than face the voters this fall, in a final display of what he thinks of the folks back home who oppose the bill, switched his vote from no to yes.

Here’s how the so-called Slaughter Solution works. Under her death-defying procedural hoodwinkery, the House will vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass the House vote, Slaughter’s rule says that the Senate bill is “hereby deemed” to have been approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Having thus voted, the Democrats would send the Senate bill to the White House for Obama’s signature and the reconciled bill would go to the Senate for its approval. Stay with me here. The Dems would by their actions declare themselves to simultaneously be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote. These guys have to be as mad as the Hatter and the Hare or the laughable John Kerry who voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it.

Hey! I’m not making this stuff up.

The Slaughter rule may be clever, but it isn’t constitutional. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s also the opinion of a number of constitutional scholars who have weighed in on the matter, one of whom, Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation, has already written a “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” which he will file as soon as the rule is used, naming Obama, Eric Holder, and other cabinet members as defendants.

Slaughter’s two-votes-in-one sleight-of-hand is a bald-faced violation of the plain language of Article I Section 5 and Section 7 of Constitution, whose purpose was clearly intended to make Congress accountable for the laws they pass. Pelosi’s stooge, Slaughter intends that the House members avoid accountability by providing them cover that they are not on record for having voted for the Senate bill.

Article I Section 5 of the Constitution says:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

Article I Section 7 of the Constitution says:

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. But in all such Cases 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.

If one chamber of Congress doesn’t like the provisions of a bill passed by the other, representatives of both chambers meet as a conference committee to reconcile their differences. Only after both houses of congress have re-voted on the exact same bill – not one jot or tittle of which may differ in the House and Senate versions – can the bill go forward for the President’s signature. The Slaughter gimmickry fails that requirement because the Senate votes only on the amendatory bill. The House voted on one bill with one vote and the Senate will vote on another with one vote, but no single bill passed in both house in the exact same form.

The Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the "exact text" must be approved by one house; the other house must approve "precisely the same text." The Court made a similar ruling in a 1983 case. Challenges to the Slaughter chicanery will be based on these precedents.

And comments made this week by Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi that similar procedures have been used before are delusional. The Supreme Court has said in past cases that repetition of an unconstitutional process does not make it constitutional.

There seems to be enough sufficiently credible constitutional questions to pique the interest of the Supreme Court. The Constitution and the American people will otherwise be the losers.

Obama may regret lecturing the Justices on the law in his January SOTU polemic.