O'Bama?

“I am not a crook”.

Those words are now infamous because they were uttered by a president who was a lawyer. And they will echo through the American conciousness for generations. Well, now we have another one and this one could utter them again before his term is over.

I’m not one; neither a president nor a lawyer and I haven’t played either on television but, I have read the Constitution and I do have a modicum of common sense. So here’s my take for whatever it’s worth. But, please let me add, if I were to become a lawyer, I would want to be constitutional one..

The president and the Democratic congressional leadership are fighting furiously to pass, with no Republican votes, the ever-less-popular health bill. An Associated Press poll last week shows that four in five Americans don't want the Democrats to pass a health care bill without bipartisan support, while almost all polls are showing support for the current bill to be at only 25 percent to 35 percent.

And all polls show high negative intensity.

The resistance of the People to passing so unpopular a bill is so powerful that it has driven Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Chairwoman of the Rules Committee Louise Slaughter, at least for the moment, to actually contemplate publicly violating the constitutional process for enacting laws.

Now remember, part of their oath when they first trudged up the steps to the Capitol, was “to preserve, protect and defend” the solemn provisions of that document. But now it seems that’s all gone out of the window. Under their announced scheme, instead of following the constitutional voting process:-

The House first votes for the Senate bill, then …

After that is signed into law by the president and the Senate passes the popular amendments that the House wants …

The House votes for that second Senate bill of amendments, which …

Obama then signs it into law.

Under the proposed scheme, the Senate bill would be "deemed" to have passed the House and become law without a presidential signature. Then the Senate would pass the House-demanded amendments, and the House members would then cast only one vote -- for the amendments they like, rather than the underlying Senate bill they hate.

Thus, (so Pelosi's theory holds) politically protecting House members, who could say they never actually voted for the publicly despised Senate bill.

But, as has been pointed out in several venues in the last few days, Article 1 Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution requires that before a bill becomes law, "Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it"; and, "in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively."

It is those two provisions of the Constitution that would be evaded: the House vote, with the names and votes of the individual members publicly published, and the president's signature.

That is James Madison's precise 18th century version of transparency and accountability and the Supreme Court has only recently emphasized that those procedures must be followed precisely.

It speaks to the sturdiness of the system which our founders installed that it is, as intended, so resistant to passing major legal and cultural changes against the overwhelming will of the public. So resistant that, in frustration, the Democratic speaker of the House has been driven to consider breaking her oath of office and violate the Constitution in order to get her way. Presumably, when she is better counseled, she will dismiss this wayward idea.

Should she follow through on her threat, however, the product would not be a law, but a nullity -- an aborted, inert thing.

It would be, in essence, an attempted congressional putsch against the Constitution.

But still our governing system would not be broken as long as the president would do his constitutional duty, as assuredly he should, and neither sign nor veto it, but rather, publicly declare it a nullity, tear it up and burn it, as one would a piece of trash. Because that is, precisely what it is. But, this president, who knows?

But I suspect I do and you do too.

And now you know why the old saying is that there are two things you don’t want to see made: Laws and Sausages.

And I would add one more; Fish Sticks!

Trust me, I’ve been there!

Erin Go Bragh