Since the Democrats retook control of Congress in January 2007, liberal lawmakers have been working to advance one of their favorite causes: granting the District of Columbia a full seat in the House of Representatives. They have tried on several occasions to pass legislation to accomplish this and have been thwarted each time, most recently in the spring. In a new effort to ram the bill through, its backers may try to attach it to the conference report of the must-pass defense spending bill. By linking the two unrelated bills, …
Ed Whelan has a strong column in yesterday’s Washington Post on the Attorney General’s attempt to suppress an Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluding that the pending D.C. “voting rights” bill is unconstitutional. (We share that view.) This is not, as the Post had put it previously, a case of different parts of DOJ having different opinions, but an end-run around the Department’s usual clearance process: Now, it’s legitimate, if exceedingly rare, for an attorney general to contest OLC’s advice…. But there’s a right way to overrule OLC, and then …
Chalk up a big loss for constitutional rule of law, thanks to an Obama Administration sleight-of-hand reported on the front page of today’s Washington Post. When the Executive Branch needs legal advice, it goes to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. OLC is like an in-house Supreme Court: it evaluates the constitutionality of pending legislation and issues binding opinions on the legality of different policy options. And like a court, OLC has a strong institutional memory and tradition; its legal opinions generally don’t change much from …
The Senate is currently considering legislation that would give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives. The legislation is patently unconstitutional, which should end the debate at the outset. But it is important to note that it is unconstitutional not simply because it was written that way in a musty old 18th Century document. In this instance, the Constitution’s text is not an anachronism, something well suited for the late 18th Century but no longer applicable in contemporary times. The Founders certainly knew that the Constitution would not allow D.C. to have …
