So let's let the games begin of the 112th olympiad in Washington DC.
Code:January 6, 2011, 12:15 pm
House Reading of Constitution Is Not Without Issues
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Setting the tone for the 112th Congress — in which every House bill must cite the constitutional source of its authority — members of House of Representatives began to read the United States Constitution aloud from the floor of their chamber Thursday morning.
Like the Constitutional Convention itself, things did not begin auspiciously.
Before the reading began, Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington, asked Republicans to illuminate exactly what part of the Constitution would be read, what parts would be deleted and who would decide how things would unfold.
It was decided in advance that any portion of the Constitution that was superseded by amendments — including the amendments themselves — would not be read, preventing lawmakers from having to make references to slaves, referred to in article one section two as “three fifths of all other Persons” or things like prohibition.
These inquiries about parliamentary procedure were not well received, and for several minutes, before a word of the preamble could be uttered, Democrats and Republicans batted back and forth over the issue of language, perhaps presaging future partisan battles over the meaning, purpose and application of the document.
Once that was settled, just after 11 a.m., Representative John Boehner, the newly installed speaker of the House read the preamble (that magical “We the people”), before yielding to the woman who handed him the gavel Wednesday, Representative Nancy Pelosi, who picked up with Article one section one (“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives”), followed by Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and other House leaders.
From there, members who wished to read were recognized from their seats, beginning with Representative Steve Rothman, a Democrat from New Jersey. So it was, sentence by sentence, in accents that reflect that the myriad districts that did not even exist when the document came to being, by women and African Americans whose full rights were not recognized at that time, the Constitutional language fluttered through the chamber.
At one point, there was yelling in the chamber, and the Sergeant of Arms was called to remove a protester.
The reading of the document on the floor of the House, an act that is part of the new rules package, serves multiple purposes, said Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia who came up with the idea for the live reading. Largely, it was meant as instruction to members, who now must use it to underlie their bills, and to inform voters.
“Throughout the last year there has been a great debate about the expansion of the Federal government, and lots of my constituents have said that Congress has gone beyond its powers granted in the Constitution,” said Mr. Goodlatte, a senior Member of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over Constitutional amendments. He added: “I think it is important that we send a message to people at home that the constitution is important document.”
But it was also clearly meant as a nod to the Tea Party movement, a loosely organized political movement whose members cite the Constitution as the basis for much of their political theory concerning federal powers and the rights and responsibilities of Congress.
To wit, the document reading is happening on the same day that House Republicans began the contentious process of repealing the health care law, which Republicans have long said lacks constitutional basis.
Further, before the reading began, the Constitution was already being used as a weapon of argument by both sides of the aisle, some of whom clutched it, as the House began to debate anew the health care law, which Republicans have vowed to repeal, beginning on Thursday.
The order of reading was ironed out at the last minute, with the goal of letting all who wished to read do so, but making sure there was party parity, he said. “We have spread the word to everyone and there was a lot of interest,” Mr. Goodlatte said.
According to the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives, the only two prior instances in which a full or partial text of the Constitution was inserted into the Congressional Record was in 1882, when Roswell Flower of New York “appended” a text of the Constitution — minus the amendments — into the record, and in 1915, when Thomas Reilly of Connecticut inserted the full text of the Constitution into the Congressional Record as an extension of his remarks. But the office could not find any examples of the full text of the Constitution actually being read out loud on the House Floor.
