Hillary and the Constitution -- Members of the Senate are not above the law.
Ubiquitous
a few legal eagles are asking as they note that Hillary Clinton can't become
Secretary of State thanks to something called the Emoluments Clause of the
Constitution. Under that clause of Article I, a Member of Congress who has
been in office while a pay raise was passed for a federal job may not then be
appointed to the job at the higher salary. Mrs. Clinton was a Senator this
January when President Bush passed an executive order increasing the Secretary
of State's pay to $191,300 from $186,600. As a legal matter, that should
disqualify her.
Senate Democrats are hoping to finesse the problem with the so-called "Saxbe
fix," whereby the salary raise for Secretary of State would return to its
previous level. Democrats point out this was used by Richard Nixon to make
Ohio Senator William Saxbe Attorney General, and again for Lloyd Bentsen to
become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration.
The Founders wrote the Emoluments Clause to prevent Members from enriching
themselves by setting up plum assignments and then maneuvering into the jobs.
If Congress is able to ignore language expressly written to curtail its power,
the clause is effectively a dead letter. As Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute
points out, 10 Democratic Senators objected to the Saxbe fix in Mr. Bentsen's
case.
To our knowledge, Senator Clinton played no role in the salary raise, and she
clearly had grander ambitions than Secretary of State when the law was signed.
But while the issue will strike some as trivial, it is no small matter to
ignore the Constitution's direct words. Giving Mrs. Clinton a pay cut is a
minimum gesture of deference required to the document that Mr. Obama will soon
swear an oath to preserve, protect and defend.
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It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.