California Conservative

Mark Levin’s Legal Landmark Foundation has announced that they will file an appeal to the Democrats’ health care bill the minute President Obama signs it into law, if it gets that far. On a similar front, Megyn Kelly interviewed Michael McConnell, formerly a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and now a constitutional law professor at Stanford. Here’s the partial transcript of the Kelly-McConnell interview:

MCCONNELL: Well that’s right because Article I, Section VII of the Constitution lays out a procedure by which legislation has to be passed. And it requires that both houses of Congress, both the Senate and the House, seperately pass any piece of legislation before it goes to the president for his signature.

And along the way, Article I, Section V then further specifies that, upon the demand of one-fifth of the members of the House or the Senate, that the yeas and the nays must be recorded on the journal. The purpose of these provisions is to make sure that, when our senators and representatives are voting on the people’s business, that they do so on the record and that their constituents can later see what they’ve done.

Think of that part of the transcript as the foundation for discussing the constitutionality of the rule. Here’s the part of the transcript that deals with what’s specifically required for constitutional passage of a bill:

MCCONNELL: The Supreme Court has been quite clear and consistent that in order to comply with Article I, Section VII, the exact same text of a bill has to be passed by both the House and the Senate. Now as I understand this procedure, the idea is that the House would take the Senate version of the bill, and not actually voting on it, would deem it passed by virtue of passing a vote adopting seperate legislation which amends the bill in order to eliminate all those special deals and so forth.

Here’s what Levin told his radio audience: (more…)