Congressional Quarterly reports on dubious Senate action:
The Senate on Thursday overrode President Bush’s veto of what turned out to be an incomplete five-year farm bill, enacting the measure into law.
Despite Republican complaints and warnings that the action could invite lawsuits, the Senate voted 82-13, with one member voting “present,” to override the veto of the bill (HR 2419) that Congress sent to Bush last week. The House overrode the veto Wednesday evening by 316-108. The votes in both chambers exceeded the two-thirds majority needed to enact a law over the president’s veto.
The Heritage Foundation reports on why this action is dubious:
As every school child knows, to become law, Art. I, § 7 of the U.S. Constitution requires a bill to go through the formal process of bicameral passage in Congress and presentment to the President. Should the President veto the legislation, then it may become law if it is “repassed by two thirds of the Senate and the House of Representatives.” The word repassed is important to the current controversy, because the farm bill as currently considered by the House and Senate never passed. Rather, a different bill—a version which included Title III—passed, however that is not the bill which was presented to the President. Accordingly, because the bill that passed is not the bill that was presented to the President and returned to Congress with his veto, their subsequent vote to override the veto cannot meet the requirements of repassage.
The fact that the bill contained much of the same material or the same bill number is not sufficient for repassage. It must be identical. This is particularly important in appropriations bills. As public choice literature demonstrates, appropriations bills are often consensus bills—legislation in which not only different parties, but different interest groups form deals in order to secure the passage of the larger legislation. Thus, a large appropriations bill like the farm bill might not even have passed at all if a significant section of the bill were not included. Those who cast their votes in Congress for the farm bill did so to pass a bill that included Title III, and that likely influenced their decision to vote for the bill at all. In other words, we have no way of knowing whether the incorrectly transmitted bill would have ever passed both houses of Congress as is (without Title III), because the votes that were tallied were not for such a bill.
Technorati tags: Farm Subsidies, Politics.
Tags: farm subsidies, Politics
