I hope you are right Danglars, but I am forced to wonder why this angle hasn't been persued to force the courts to strike this monster down.
I guess it may have persued, I don't know, but it would appear that if it was it held no weight.
Oh, I didn't mean there's anything to pursue here.
It does fulfill the letter of the requirement, as I mentioned, that's why it was never pursued. I meant that doing it this way can't be said to fulfill the
spirit of the requirement. Think of it this way: if I send you a box full of important stuff, possibly, oh, I don't know, beer and bacon, and you're supposed to give the beer and bacon to someene else, but instead keep the b and b for yourself and pack a lot of old, disgusting sneakers into the box, and then you give it to that someone else, you've definitely given that someone else the box, but not its contents--and we're the someone else, in the case of laws. That's about as much honor and truth and substance as this game of fill-up-the-shell extends to the Constitutional requirement that spending bills originate in the House. I don't know the full history of this shell game, no doubt both parties have done this for matters less momentous.
Congress comes up with all kinds of crap to get around the Constitution within the framework of their own rulemaking. Since each chamber has plenary power to make its own rules of order and passage, except for a few specified requirements (eg, there has to be a Speaker of the House, the speaker is specifically named in Article II, but in fact no mention is made of the Senate majority leader, only that they'll "pick their own officers"), they stretch that plenary power to get around the enumerated demands of the Constitution. I'd say it would be nice if a Republican majority in both chambers would take a look at all this bullshit with an eye to adhering more closely to what the Constitution fairly obviously intended, but they'd be wasting their time; future Congresses could go back at any time to playing these games, and of course it'd be the Dems who use these tactics for BIG, country-changing items, not just for tweaks in laws here and there.
