Thursday - December 11, 2008

It still ain’t right

Just because Tricky Dicky managed to get away with it doesn’t mean it was the correct thing to do. Hey, somebody broke into a house in your neighborhood last year. Then there was that burglary across town 4 months ago. That doesn’t mean it’s Ok for somebody to break into your house tonight. Precedent only matters if it was the right course of action the first time through. Or the second. Repeating an action (that ought to be a crime) because other people have done it doesn’t make it right. Any other way of looking at it is legal-beagle bullshit. As your mother used to say, “just because everyone else is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t mean I’m going to let you jump too”.

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 increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 6

Hillary Clinton’s pay check has officially been cut.
Congress voted Wednesday night to reduce the Secretary of State’s salary back to its pre-2007 level of $186,000 to conform to a clause in the constitution stipulating a member of congress cannot be appointed to a government job if the position’s salary has increased during the lawmaker’s current term.

Clinton’s second term began in January 2007.

The conservative activist group Judicial Watch circulated the clause in question, Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution, soon after President-elect Barack Obama announced he was nominating Clinton to the top diplomatic post. Noting the clause, Judicial Watch said it was illegal for Clinton to be nominated to the post since President Bush authorized a nearly $5,000 pay raise for job last January.

“There’s no getting around the Constitution’s ineligibility clause, so Hillary Clinton is prohibited from serving in the Cabinet until at least 2013, when her current term expires,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

But lawmakers have gotten around the clause before in the same fashion they have now: with Congress changing the salary of the office in question back to what it originally was.

It happened when Ohio Sen. William Saxbe was named President Nixon’s attorney general in 1974 and again when Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen became President Clinton’s Treasury secretary in 1993.

While Clinton is missing out on the nearly $5,000 pay raise, she still stands to make about $10,000 more as secretary of state than she currently draws as a U.S. senator.

Sorry, this doesn’t wash. Just because Congress may have cut the position’s salary now does not mean that it was not increased then. And it was. I’m sure Condi has her pay stubs that can prove it. Thus those pesky “Emoluments whereof” have been increased. The Constitution doesn’t say word one about them being decreased later on. And I’m still holding onto the “Time for which he was elected” aspect. Her Term won’t be up until 2013. She can be SoS then. Until then, she’s SoL.

Since she didn’t actually do a lick of work, or even show up at the office the entire second term until after November 4 because she was out campaigning, she should have resigned instead of running for re-election. In which case she’d be perfectly eligible for SoS. Instead she ran, and has been collecting a fat paycheck for a job she hasn’t bothered to do until this month.

Friggin amazin how the Circle of O is bending all the rules into pretzels and he hasn’t even been crowned yet. Looks more like All Corruption, All The Term.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/11/2008 at 03:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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