U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton is constitutionally ineligible to serve as President-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state, a legal watchdog group said Tuesday.
Judicial Watch said the Ineligibility Clause of the United States Constitution says that no member of Congress can be appointed to an office that has benefited from a salary increase during the time that person was in Congress.
The Washington-based group points to a January 2008 Executive Order signed by President George W. Bush during Clinton’s current Senate term that increased the salary for secretary of state.
“No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time,” Article I, section 6 of the U.S. Constitution says.
Obama announced Monday that Clinton, the junior senator from New York, was his pick for secretary of state.
SOURCE: Read more here
Is this another way that Barack will try and work to lower the bar of the U.S. Constitution? He does not seem to know the Constitution very well or is fighting against it knowing that he’s wrong! If the U.S. Constitution says “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time,” then should Hillary be allow to be secretary of state? Simple as that! What do you think, should we go by the U.S. Constitution or just forget it?
LINKS:
(1) Will Obama Violate The Constitution?
This post will give all the mental midgets something to bitch about for years to come.
12 responses so far ↓
ahrcanum // December 4, 2008 at 7:16 PM
Perhaps she should accept the same salary as the auto execs petitioning Congress for billions- $1.00.
diogenes // December 4, 2008 at 7:57 PM
There’s far more to this “story” than has been reported, for sure. The constitutional provision was designed to make sure that a member of Congress could not vote in a pay raise for an office and then assume that same office; in effect, that would be giving themselves a raise. That’s what it was designed to stop.
If the Scretary of State’s salary was actually raised by an Executive Order which was issued by GWB, it wasn’t any of Clinton’s doin that it happened. And I wonder how it would be that FWB could give the SoS a raise; that should be within the authority of Congress, not the President.
Although GWB issued all sorts of Executive Orders on stuff that wasn’t within his authority — just one of the many messes Obama will have to clean up after GWB flees town.
goodtimepolitics // December 4, 2008 at 8:40 PM
Its just another one of those things that we will have to wait and see. But I say if we don’t go by what the U.S. Constitution says then we are under a dictator leader!
boudicabpi // December 5, 2008 at 8:03 AM
They will pull the same shenanigans that were done in the past to get around this issue. Lower the Secretary’s salary to the previous amount. Defeats the intent, but legal.
Bob A.
lukemcgook // December 5, 2008 at 8:43 AM
“And I wonder how it would be that FWB [sic] could give the SoS a raise; that should be within the authority of Congress, not the President.”
di, you must book up on this stuff in order to avoid giving your students yet more misinformation. Here’s a good discussion.
http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1227548910.shtml
The pay raises are ultimately authorized by Congress, so the “executive order” business is baloney. It may be that the “Saxbe fix” satisfies the spirit of the law, but the letter of Article I, Section 6 is pretty clear. Hillary as SoS is against that law.
dsgawrsh // December 5, 2008 at 5:36 PM
Well, Obama’s eligibility has been in question and basically ignored so should we be surprised? The Constitution has steadily taken a backseat through each prior administration and I believe with Obama set to “rule”, the Constitution will be put to bed for good. Right now the Federal Reserve is the most powerful entity in America and is not even a part of the government. I’m sure the Founding Fathers would have had no problem with that.
diogenes // December 5, 2008 at 7:15 PM
Despite one lawyer saying it’s a problem, nobody should definitively conclude it IS a problem. If the “Saxbe solution” worked once, odds are it would work again. If automatic COLA pay raises are interpreted this way, it seems like it would effectively stop ANY Senator or Congressperson from ever taking on a Cabinet post. Surely that doesn’t help the country, and it’s doubtful that that’s what the drafters had in mind when they drafted that language.
And yes, you’ve all found “us” out: the plan all along has been to install Barack Obama as Supreme Dictator. On January 21, 2009. he will announce, by Executive Order, that the Constitution of the United States is no longer valid, and Democrats will rule ad infinitum.
I think I saw that on an episode of “Pinky and the Brain” once…. and I laughed at its absuridty that time, too.
lukemcgook // December 5, 2008 at 8:40 PM
“If automatic COLA pay raises are interpreted this way, it seems like it would effectively stop ANY Senator or Congressperson from ever taking on a Cabinet post. Surely that doesn’t help the country, and it’s doubtful that that’s what the drafters had in mind when they drafted that language.”
1) You’ll have to explain how Congress’ arranging for automatic pay increases obviates the Constitutional prohibition. A pay increase is a pay increase.
2) If the *cursus honorum* is so important to you, perhaps you’d like to see COLA raises for cabinet posts ended. We’ve done without them for most of our history. Come to think of it, inflation *should* be painful to creatures of the state. The founders understood inflation. I suspect they would have disliked COLA-style devices exempting the privileged from inflation’s effects.
3) Regardless of your opinion of what does and does not help the country, keeping legislators out of executive slots that they themselves have upholstered is *exactly* what the founders had in mind.
And I expect you’ve heard Obama speaking of his preference for Constitutional overhaul by the courts. This wasn’t on Pinky And The Brain, but there are tapes.
diogenes // December 5, 2008 at 11:46 PM
Oh, please, stop with the edited tapes already! Letterman does a better and more realistic job when he totally splices together unrelated words from different speeches to form absolutely incredible sentences.
The tapes you’re referring to relate solely to school segregation issues. And Obama was suggesting that, while Brown v. Board of Ed was a huge step in the right direction, it didn’t do much to solve the funding problems for schools in poorer neighborhoods, as property taxes are the basis for most school funding. If poorer school in poorer neighborhoods cannot raise more monies to fund lesser schools, they’re in a viscious neverending cycle of futility.
As for your comment about “keeping legislators out of executive slots that THEY THEMSELVES have uphoslstered is *exactly* what the founders had in mind” I could not agree more. Problem for you is Clinton did NOT upholster this job… which is exactly why my hunch is htat they’ll find a way not to penalize her for something she didn’t do.
But it’s pretty obvious that you and GTP never found anything good that any Democrat ever did (except maybe lose an election and/or die) so it doesn’t surprise anyone that you’d go after Clinton, too. Especially since the whole SCOTUS deal on Obama’s citizenship likely evaporated today.
lukemcgook // December 6, 2008 at 4:12 PM
Well, let’s see here.
1) “Clinton did NOT upholster this job… which is exactly why my hunch is htat [sic] they’ll find a way not to penalize her for something she didn’t do.”
Evidently you’re arguing that, since Congress can make future executive branch pay raises automatic, no member of Congress is *ever* disqualified by the “emoluments” provision, unless perhaps that member was serving at Year Zero — 1999 in the case of the latest raises. In other words, Art I, Sec 6 has been rendered nugatory … by act of Congress! Needless to say, this is not what the founders had in mind. In fact, as Volokh’s correspondent points out in the discussion I linked to, the founders actually discarded a draft that would have limited the disqualifying pay raises to those raises enacted by Congress. No matter the provenance of the pay increase, an increase that occurs during a member’s elected term disqualifies that member. Period. Now, it may be that *reversing* an increase, as in the Saxbe fix, conforms to the *spirit* of the law. But resorting to “spiritual” interpretations, as the federal bench so often does in recent history, with their powers of time travel and mind melding, is defensible only when the letter of the law is unclear. Article I, Section 6 is very clear. Hillary (and Bentsen, and Saxbe) are unconstitutional appointments. The Constitution is not something to be worked around, which brings us to …
2) “The tapes you’re referring to relate solely to school segregation issues. And Obama was suggesting that, while Brown v. Board of Ed was a huge step in the right direction, it didn’t do much to solve the funding problems for schools in poorer neighborhoods …”
No. Here’s the WBEZ tape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck
I’d dearly like to see a transcript of the whole program, but the excerpt here is sufficiently damning. After the “reparative work” call, Obama is indeed talking about the practical and political inadequacy of the courts to the job of running local school systems. But at this point in the show, O-boy has already explained that
“.. the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.”
“… one of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement was because the Civil Rights Movement became so Court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Just “redistributive change.” Just “economic justice.” No qualifications implied here. Tragically, the courts, with their pesky fixation on the Constitution, haven’t done enough. We must resort to “coalitions of power” if we’re to get the wealth-spreading job done. Always about power on the Left.
3) “… you and GTP never found anything good that any Democrat ever did …”
Grover Cleveland was a good president. GTP may have his own favorite D.
4) “… the whole SCOTUS deal on Obama’s citizenship likely evaporated today.”
The issue won’t evaporate until the birth certificate is made public, as I’m sure you know. Now, even if it turns out that O was born in Kenya, yet another constitutional “work-around” will be found. We’ll all agree to agree that “birth citizenship,” defined statutorily, satisfies the “natural-born” requirement. This won’t be true, of course, since the founders clearly had one common law notion or another in mind, but I’m sure it will do the trick, just as a Saxbe-style work-around will do the trick for Hillary. But all this fiddling with the law of the land is getting to be kind of a bad habit, don’t you think? Say, I don’t believe you’ve ever told us why you think Obama’s stonewalling.
diogenes // December 6, 2008 at 11:45 PM
OK, one last time: Obama isn’t “stonewalling” as youo term it. Obama doesn’t dance to your tune, nor jump through the hoops you hold up. You and your ilk don’t call the shots.
And don’t even start with the “the AMERICAN PEOPLE DEMAND IT”. Bull. The American people voted for the man, so shut up already. You annoying little gnats buzzing around, making just enough noise in the ear to be annoying, but really of no significance whatsoever.
Obama will be President, Clinton will be Secretary of State, and there’s not a damn thing any of you can do to stop it. Your best shot was on November 4, and you failed miserably: the largest margin of victory for any non-incumbent preseidential candidate in our nation’s glorious history. DO you even BEGIN to get that? LMAO
lukemcgook // December 7, 2008 at 12:14 PM
Not clear from your post why you think Obama won’t release his birth certificate. Care to try again?