House GOP leadership to start 112th with reading of the Constitution

The House of Representatives will read the Constitution aloud today, starting at 10 am. You can watch it live via the internet by going to CSpan HERE.

House lawmakers will also take up a spending cut bill, a five percent cut taken from lawmaker and committee budgets, worth about $35 million dollars.

Your Vote, Your Opinion: Are the President's Actions Really "Impeachable"?

Vote in the column to the left. Comment below.

Arizona Legislator Calls Obama’s Actions “Impeachable”

The campaign to impeach Barack Obama has a distinguished new advocate: Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who authored Arizona’s immigration law S.B. 1070. During a speech on November 19, Pearce told an audience:

Think about it. This is the first time in the history of the United States that a sitting president has sided with a foreign government to sue the citizens of its country. For defending our laws? For defending and protecting the citizens of the state of Arizona? It’s outrageous, and it’s impeachable.

Senator Pearce was referring to the Obama administration’s decision to invite 11 Central and South American nations to join the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona. This outsourcing ignores the president’s numerous lawsuits against the state, as well as motions against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for “racial profiling,” on the grounds he arrested too many Hispanics near our open border with Mexico.

The lawsuit was perhaps the least offensive or forceful measure the president has taken against the will of his own citizens. The Obama administration hauled Arizona before the UN Human Rights Council after it passed Pearce’s bill.

After Governor Jan Brewer learned about Obama’s outrage, she sent a letter demanding Hillary Clinton strike the reference from the UNHRC report. Hillary refused.

In September, a UN committee issued a thinly veiled denunciation of Arizonans as “xenophobes and racists.” Then Obama allowed human rights violators to humiliate the United States in the Geneva forum while appointing milquetoast globalists like “transnationalist” Harold Koh to “defend” America.

His efforts to enlist foreign nations and the UN to overturn state policies with which he disagrees is indeed unconstitutional, and one of many grounds for impeachment. This author is pleased to have perhaps the best state senator in the United States voicing such truths, especially to those who are hostile to them.

Opinion: The Separation of Islamophilia from State

By George Neumayr
By modern secularist standards, Barack Obama's boosterism for Islam violates the "separation between Church and state." Had George W. Bush held a rosary and modest fish dinner at the White House to mark the beginning of Lent, the ACLU left would have freaked out. But these same secularists didn't mind Barack's "Iftar dinner" last Friday night.

That is, until he wimped out on his endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque. Now his dinner looks to them more like the production of Ishtar, as finger-to-the-wind Dems cravenly scramble for cover. The search is on for a "compromise." Perhaps the self-styled Solomonic Obama can convince the mosque planners to transfer their property rights to NASA. Administrator Charles Bolden could then turn the land into a satellite office for contractors who pursue the space agency's "perhaps foremost" mission (as explained to him by Obama): "to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering."

The moment one thinks this presidency has hit the bottom of grim parody it finds a new one. It is hard to keep track of them at this point, but any list of the White House's greatest Islamophilic hits would have to include: wanting a civilian jury trial for the 9/11 planners, refusing to identify radical Islam as a terrorist motive, endorsing the concept of jihad, fretting over the loss of "diversity" after the Fort Hood shooting, and vacationing through the fallout of an aborted Christmas day bombing over Detroit.

The White House's ideologically willful self-delusion about radical Islam is staggering. Here, for example, is its self-reporting at whitehouse.gov about the Ramadan dinner: "Last night, President Obama continued the White House tradition of hosting an Iftar -- the meal that breaks the day of fasting --celebrating Ramadan in the State Dining Room." Continued a tradition? Exactly which White House tradition is that?

The answer: Obama was referring not to a White House "tradition" but to one distant event that he carefully left vague: Thomas Jefferson's war negotiations with Tunisian envoy Sidi Soliman Mellimelli.

Jefferson, desperate to end the Barbary war with Islamic pirates, invited Mellimelli to Washington for negotiations. According to Gaye Wilson, the visit put Jefferson and his staff on the spot: James Madison, then the Secretary of State, had to field Mellimelli's request for "concubines." Jefferson told shocked colleagues to calm down; after all, peace with the Barbary pirates required passing "unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers." Mellimelli, in his own way, was grateful. After hearing some gossip about the wan mood of the childless Madisons, he "flung his 'magical' cloak around Dolley Madison and murmured an incantation that promised she would bear a male child. His conjuring, however, did not work."

The war negotiations happened to coincide with Ramadan. Consequently, a scheduled dinner at the White House had to be moved back from "half after three" to "precisely at sunset" in order for Mellimelli to show up.

While it is true that the basically agnostic Jefferson was an arrogant secularist in embryo (the type on display now who dislikes all religions save Islam), he was under no illusions about jihadists. The Obama White House makes references to the "Koran" Jefferson owned, as if he had purchased it for religious edification. The truth is that he purchased it for self-protection: he wanted to understand the attitudes and war tactics of the Barbary pirates.

The cocky frat-boy "Republican" on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough, a hopelessly smug lightweight who tries to weigh in on the "big issues" of the day when not playing early-morning grabass with his equally shallow but self-important guests, has said repeatedly that the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to protect projects like the Ground Zero mosque. No, they didn't. "Morning Joe" is mistaking Thurgood Marshall's "living" Constitution for theirs.

While the Founding Fathers certainly didn't want anyone coerced in matters of faith, they wrote it to protect the states from a future federal government that might swoop down and crush the public religious life of majorities in those states. (And, by the way, let's cut the PC crap about Jefferson as the father of the First Amendment; he wasn't even at the Constitutional Convention. He was in France as an ambassador, gazing with approval at budding French Revolutionaries.) For many decades after the Constitution was enacted several states still had religious litmus tests for public office and sent tax dollars directly to the churches of their choice.

In other words, it is the very First Amendment that Scarborough mangles which permits New Yorkers to block the construction of a mosque. The First Amendment was designed to protect the majority from the tyranny of a religious minority favored by the federal government. What radical Islam's useful idiots in the White House and the press call "religious freedom," the founders would have called insanely dumb religious relativism and self-hating stupidity.

TAS

Ariz. lawmaker takes aim at automatic citizenship

PHOENIX – Emboldened by passage of the nation's toughest law against illegal immigration, the Arizona politician who sponsored the measure now wants to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in this country to undocumented parents.

Legal scholars laugh out loud at Republican state Sen. Russell Pearce's proposal and warn that it would be blatantly unconstitutional, since the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.

But Pearce brushes aside such concerns. And given the charged political atmosphere in Arizona, and public anger over what many regard as a failure by the federal government to secure the border, some politicians think the idea has a chance of passage.

"I think the time is right," said state Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who is chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. "Federal inaction is unacceptable, so the states have to start the process."

Earlier this year, the Legislature set off a storm of protests around the country when it passed a law that directs police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. The law also makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. The measure, which takes effect July 29 unless blocked in court, has inflamed the national debate over immigration and led to boycotts against the state.

An estimated 10.8 million illegal immigrants were living in the U.S. as of January 2009, according to the Homeland Security Department. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that as of 2008, there were 3.8 million illegal immigrants in this country whose children are U.S. citizens.

Pearce, who has yet to draft the legislation, proposes that the state of Arizona no longer issue birth certificates unless at least one parent can prove legal status. He contends that the practice of granting citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. encourages illegal immigrants to come to this country to give birth and secure full rights for their children.

"We create the greatest inducement for breaking our laws," he said.

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." But Pearce argues that the amendment was meant to protect black people.

"It's been hijacked and abused," he said. "There is no provision in the 14th Amendment for the declaration of citizenship to children born here to illegal aliens."

John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said Pearce's interpretation is "just completely wrong." The "plain meaning" of the amendment is clear, he said.

Senate candidate Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and darling of the tea party movement, made headlines last month after he told a Russian TV station that he favors denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

A similar bill was introduced at the federal level in 2009 by former Rep. Nathan Deal, a Georgia Republican, but it has gone nowhere.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, based in Washington, said Pearce's idea would stop immigrants from traveling to the U.S. to give birth.

"Essentially we are talking about people who have absolutely no connection whatever with this country," spokesman Ira Mehlman said. "The whole idea of citizenship means that you have some connection other than mere happenstance that you were born on U.S. soil."

Citizenship as a birthright is rare elsewhere in the world. Many countries require at least one parent to be a citizen or legal resident.

Adopting such a practice in the U.S. would be not only unconstitutional but also impractical and expensive, said Michele Waslin, a policy analyst with the pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center in Washington.

"Every single parent who has a child would have to go through this bureaucratic process of proving their own citizenship and therefore proving their child's citizenship," she said.

Araceli Viveros, 27, and her husband, Saul, 34, are illegal immigrants from the Mexican state of Guerrero. He has been in Phoenix for 20 years, she for 10, and their 2- and 9-year-old children are U.S. citizens.

"I am so proud my children were born here. They can learn English and keep studying," Viveros said in Spanish.

She said her husband has been working hard in Phoenix as a landscaper, and their children deserve to be citizens. The lawmaker's proposal "is very bad," she said. "It's changing the Constitution, and some children won't have the same rights as other children."

Associated Press

An unconstitutional solution--Powerline

Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford and a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, argues that the "Slaughter solution" for enacting Obamacare is unconstitutional. The argument, which appears in the Wall Street Journal, is straightforward:

The Slaughter solution cannot be squared with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.

Senate rules protect against majoritarian overreach by allowing a determined minority to filibuster most types of legislation. The majority needs 60 votes to override a filibuster. One exception, adopted in 1974, is legislation that makes adjustments to spending or revenues to reconcile current law to a budget resolution that has passed Congress. These are called reconciliation bills, and they require only a majority vote.

Last Christmas Eve, the Senate approved a health-care bill by 60 votes, overcoming a Republican filibuster. This is the bill that contains the so-called Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana purchase, taxes on high-cost health insurance plans and coverage for abortions. Virtually no one now supports that version of the bill, but Senate Democrats no longer have enough votes to pass an alternative bill under ordinary procedures.

That is where reconciliation fits in. If the House passes the Senate bill and the president then signs it into law, reconciliation would permit Congress to pass new legislation making changes to that law. Reconciliation might not solve the abortion coverage problem or other nonbudgetary issues, but it would allow Democrats to correct most of the Senate bill's offensive features.

The rub is that, according to the Senate parliamentarian, reconciliation is permitted only for bills that amend existing law, not for amendments to bills that have yet to be enacted. This means that, for the Senate to be able to avoid a filibuster, House Democrats first have to vote for the identical bill that passed the Senate last Christmas Eve. That means voting aye on the special deals, aye on abortion coverage, and aye on high taxes on expensive health-insurance plans. Challengers are salivating at the prospect of running against incumbents who vote for these provisions.

Enter the Slaughter solution. It may be clever, but it is not constitutional. To become law--hence eligible for amendment via reconciliation--the Senate health-care bill must actually be signed into law. The Constitution speaks directly to how that is done. According to Article I, Section 7, in order for a "Bill" to "become a Law," it "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate" and be "presented to the President of the United States" for signature or veto. Unless a bill actually has "passed" both Houses, it cannot be presented to the president and cannot become a law.

To be sure, each House of Congress has power to "determine the Rules of its Proceedings." Each house can thus determine how much debate to permit, whether to allow amendments from the floor, and even to require supermajority votes for some types of proceeding. But House and Senate rules cannot dispense with the bare-bones requirements of the Constitution. Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As 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."

These constitutional rules set forth in Article I are not mere exercises in formalism. They ensure the democratic accountability of our representatives. Under Section 7, no bill can become law unless it is put up for public vote by both houses of Congress, and under Section 5 "the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question . . . shall be entered on the Journal." These requirements enable the people to evaluate whether their representatives are promoting their interests and the public good. Democratic leaders have not announced whether they will pursue the Slaughter solution. But the very purpose of it is to enable members of the House to vote for something without appearing to do so. The Constitution was drafted to prevent that.

McConnell's argument seems unassailable. A legal challenge, including a petition to the Supreme Court if necessary, represents another obstacle to Obamacare in the event that the House employs the Slaughter solution.