Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Illegal Gal

OK so I stumbled upon this http://www.humblelibertarian.com/2009/01/barack-obamas-hillary-clinton.html. Not truly as boring as a babbling article about institutional something, not making past mid page, but this article on 'I will step aside and support you because you are going to give me a really powerful job Hillary,' held my attention long enough to make me nervous. Seems the Constitution doesn't mean much... Now what says you?

ps, did BO ever find his US birth certificate? ;-p

2 comments:

DMW said...

Interesting! I have to admit that the humble libertarian does seem to have a point about the constitutionality of the secretary of state's appointment. But that's hardly the only appointment in recent years to have that same problem. John Ashcroft, Tom Daschle, Don Rumsfeld (well, his Nixon job anyway), and Spencer Abraham were, I think, all illegal non-gals by this metric. Frankly, I think this constitutional requirement is kind of silly, since the pay of the cabinet is generally set by executive order, not by the legislature. And on a practical level, I seem to recall hearing that people usually get around this by declining the pay raise for themselves, thus obeying at least the spirit of the law.

The last paragraph of hyperactive whining about Obama's scorn for the constitution is, IMNSHO, ridiculous.

DMW
Non-humble non-libertarian

Nation Indivisible said...

DMW is a hairshirted penitent compared to the "Humble" Libertarian, who is less humble than I would expect even from a 21 year-old with a sideline as a Christian literalist.

What's most embarrassing for our eager young Constitutional scholar-of-his-own-making is that he "discovered" this on January 24, when it made its way through the press exactly two months earlier -- and with similar steam.

I'd agree that a literal parsing of the Constitution leaves room for doubt about whether this is strictly legal, but the intent seems clear, and the Congress addressed this in December and moved on with solving the problems of the country instead of beating their chests in an effort to hew to the instructions of a bunch of men who died 200 years ago or trying to placate the angry textualist youth. Good for them.

JEK
Contextualist