President Signs Bill Lowering Salary of Secretary of State
December 19th, 2008

On December 19, President George W. Bush signed Senate Joint Resolution 46, which lowers the salary of the Secretary of State from $191,300 to $186,600. SJR 46 had been introduced in the U.S. Senate on December 10, and it passed unanimously that same day. The House passed it unanimously on December 12. The reason for the bill is that Article I, section 6, says that no member of Congress may take an office if the salary for that office had been increased while that individual was in Congress. Senator Hillary Clinton was in Congress when the Secretary of State’s salary was increased in 2007. Link here.

Clearly the Framers are not addressing female senators.

Oh … but was that really the “intent” of the framers. Shouldn’t we follow the “principle” of the constitution rather than the letter?

Well, not as Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen likes to point out “Unless one views the Constitution’s rules as rules that may be dispensed with when inconvenient” … because “the plain linguistic meaning of this chunk of constitutional text” does not apply to women.

The vast majority of Obama supporters wouldn’t criticize McCain for appointing Luger or Lieberman to his cabinet. We’d excoriate Lieberman (and love every second of it), but we’d leave McCain himself alone.

Some pedantic Textualist would probably point out his interpretation of “Emolument,” and we’d have to cut Secretary Lieberman’s salary or put up with years of self-righteous whining.

Obviously somebody would complain. This is America. There’s always one guy. And he usually gets on Cable news so there’s conflict on the panel. Nobody watches a show that has no conflict.

The Constitution matters much more than any current politician. We replace politicians every few years. They are, to be blunt, disposable. The Constitution is not. It is the backbone of our country. It means everything.

Seriously, if McCain had won and appointed (then) sitting Senators to Cabinet positions, this would be derided in the press as Cronyism and a travesty.

There is a very blind loyalty to Obama that is stressful. I hope Obama does well as President – I would hope ANY elected President does well for our country – but I don’t understand how anyone could be so enamored of any politician, they would trample the Constitution to put him in power or to give him more power than the Constitution allows.

I do not mean to compare Obama to Hitler (that’s offensive and not intended) however . . . many people have wondered since WWII how the Germans could have so blindly followed Hitler while he seized power and did some atrocious things. That’s what I see in Obama supporters – I don’t see Obama doing Hitler things, but his supporters are so powerthirsty, so determined for him to be beyond criticism, they are bluntly in favor of him maker power decisions that violate our constitution.

That’s scary.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/senate_working_to_get_hillary.php

I have seen no legal definition of “Emoluments” in this thread. By legal I mean a definition based on actual Case Law, and Court Decisions. The actual text does not say “salary,” it says “emoluments.” Period. So you have not proven an absolute increase in salary is an increase in “Emoluments.”

IMO Emoluments are the net benefits somebody gets from holding an office. A cost-of-living increase does not increase those benefits, therefore Hillary’s fine. You respond that I’m full of shit. Neither of us can actually prove the point because there’s no precedent.

Now we get to go to Court. At great cost.

Let’s say you win. I say “OK, she’ll take the old salary, that eliminates the increase in emoluments.” You disagree.

We get to go to Court. Again. At great cost.

You get my drift?

I’d flee to canada, but they’re falling prey to legalistic BS too. The government is about to lose an important vote in Parliament, which means the Opposition takes over. So the Government has declared a month-old Parliament, that has passed zero bills, is done. It won’t vote on anything. Legalistically they may be right. They may also be full of shit. All anybody knows for sure is figuring this out will be a pain, and that until it’s figured out no legislation dealing with their economic crisis can pass.

Oh, I forgot, obama and Hillary are democrat lawyers, so the rules that apply to normal people, don’t apply to them.

They paint a clear picture of the intent of the Article and why it was written into the Constitution

Are Reed, Frontiero, Craig and their progeny – applying Fourteenth Amendment scrutiny to gender classifications – wrongly-decided? The only way you can avoid that conclusion is by accepting that the rule is not the intentions and purposes of its author. The Constitutional rule is what the text says and fairly implies, as it would have been understood when it was ratified; sometimes that rule is broader than the purposes its authors had in mind, sometimes it is narrower, sometimes it’s an altogether poor fit, but it is the rule.

And since the pay raises are automatic and created via an EO as opposed to a congressional vote of yea or nay, than that particular point is useless in this case.

No, it isn’t. The clause doesn’t say anything about how or by whom the emoluments are increased – it is triggered if they are increased.

To be sure, it can fairly be said that the framers must have assumed that any increase triggering the clause would be voted on by Congress, because pay would be drawn from the treasury, and would therefore require a Congressionally-approved appropriation per Art. 1 § 9. And It is entirely plausible that, had it had occurred to them that pay might be raised other than by statute, they would have written the clause more specifically.

But they didn’t. You now ask us to perform surgery on the clause, adopting a reading that narrows what the framers wrote to what you think that they might have written had they been blessed with greater foresight – to limit the clause’s effect solely to the scope its authors anticipated. That’s the kind of ‘original expectations’ originalism that Jack Balkin has argued is bad originalism. That won’t fly. And imagine what it would mean if it did: the framers of the 14th Amendment didn’t anticipate that the equal protection clause applied to women, and many of them did not anticipate that it would require desegregation. And yet it does, because whatever the drafters intended, the original public meaning of the words in which they cast their purposes, fairly-construed, have far broader implications than they intended. I take it that you do not consider Brown v. Board or Craig v. Boren to be wrongly-decided – which they are, of course, if your theory of interpretation is applied to the Fourteenth Amendment, as it must also be.

The better conclusion is not that Brown, Craig etc. are wrong, but that your theory is wrong. The ineligibility clause means what it says; “[i]t is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver … Men may intend what they will; but it is only the laws that they enact which bind us.” Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 17 (1997) I’m with Frank Easterbrook: “the judicial branch serves best by enforcing enacted words rather than unenacted (more likely, imagined) intents, purposes, and wills.” Textualism and the Dead Hand, 66 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1119, 1120 (1988)

She can not benefit from the pay increase.

That’s not what the Constitution says.

Why am I raising this issue ?

Because words mean things, and the words of the Constitution are the law of the land. If we play fast and lose with them here, we may as well recognize that it can happen with any other provision as well.

You say that it doesn’t make sense that “an elected representative could accept a cabinet position only under the circumstances that the position isn’t a new one, and that they haven’t received a raise since the last election,” but that is exactly what the ineligibility clause says. Unless the pay has remained the same, a member of Congress can’t be appointed to an office until the expiry of their term. Although there are high profile exceptions (Knox, Saxbe and Benson), the OLC has never treated these as authoritative (reviewing numerous opinions issued by them on the ineligibility clause’s application to various proposed appointments will confirm that OLC proceeds on the assumption that the clause means what it says, i.e. what I have said it means), and the so-called Saxbe fix has attracted bipartisan derision from sources as divergent as Michael Stokes Paulson and Mark Tushnet.

It is complicated. HC may not be legally able to accept the office she was asked to serve based upon a section of Art. 1 of the Constitution. Is it your opinion that HC can’t legally accept the position offered due to a very narrow interpretation of the law? Or is it your opinion that the law is too vague for a circumstance such as this and needs to be properly and less ambiguously defined? This isn’t a parking ticket – it is by and large an ethics question. HC’s behavior since entering the Senate has been exemplary (anyone who reads the Donkle from time to time knows I am not a fan of HC at all). However, it doesn’t make much sense that an elected representative could accept a cabinet position only under the circumstances that the position isn’t a new one, and that they haven’t received a raise since the last election.