Introduction to Civics

It seems that the President and the Senate need a refresher coarse in basic civics. There are several steps which are required in order to pass a bill into enacted law.

Step one: Both houses of Congress pass some form of the legislation.

Step two: There are invariably differences in the House and Senate versions of the bill, and so a conference committee works out a combined version of the bill and report on their combined version back to both houses of the Congress.

Step three: The Conference report (and hence, the new version of the bill) must then be approved by both houses of Congress.

Then, and only then, can the bill go to the President for signing into law.

But somehow, that critical step three was omitted from the budget bill earlier this year. Both bills passed narrowly, but the Senate bill contained drastic cuts to student loan programs and Medicaid that did not exist in the House bill. There was a very real risk that there wouldn't be sufficient support to pass the combined bill (which included the cuts), so House Republicans took the highly improper step of certifying that the Senate bill was identical to the House bill (even though it wasn't), thus skipping the conference committee and removing the ability for House members to vote on the final version of the bill.

This means that the bill as sent to President Bush never passed the House of Representatives. Which means the President could not legally sign it into law or start implementing it. Nevertheless, President Bush (knowing all of this) signed it anyway, and his Administration has since begun implementing all aspects of the new law.

Representative John Conyers and others have taken the unusual step of filing suit against the President over this bill. Read about it in Conyer's own words here.

By the way, contrary to what the Administration apologists are saying, this suit is not because of a typo in the House bill. Free Republic is having a field day claiming that the only difference between the two bills was a typo in the House bill, making the law suit frivolous. In spite of this spin, the differences in the budget cuts to Medicaid and Student Loan programs are significant, and not some mere typographic error.

Liam.