The Constitutional Council shall assume ultimate responsibility and authority for the rules and procedures for drafting and passage of laws within the overall framework of the Constitution. In all cases where the Constitutional Council intervenes in regulating the legislature it must do so with a three fifth (3/5) vote.
Remarks
The way this is to work is that the Senate and the House would operate and be governed by the established rules and procedures, and they would respond by managing their own implementation of those rules and procedures. If, however, something starts to go awry in either the Senate or the House, the Constitutional Council is there to provide the corrective that the legislature is evidently unable to provide on its own.
Among the new measures needing to be introduced and enforced by the Constitutional Council are the following:
- Ensure that there are opportunities for amendments.
- Ensure that all laws are drafted in the open manner with adequate opportunity for public comment, and that no law is voted upon with amendments that have not been available for public comment for at least 72 active Congressional Session hours (thus excluding weekends and holidays as part of the 72 hours).
- Ensure that the Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate do not use their roles to run their house of legislation as their personal fiefdom and accordingly diminish the representative roles of the individual legislators.
This is such an entrenched scandal that many people more or less expect to accept passively that once their Legislators go to Washington, they essentially become mere myrmidons of the Washington power centers and less actual representatives.
- Require of the Speaker that the appropriation bills required of The House are drafted and passed in a timely, fair, and open manner, and that the Senate takes up and addresses the same measures also in a timely, fair, and open manner.
The Constitutional Council would sit in on the Bill reconciliation sessions to ensure that the process is executed equitably.All meetings, committee meetings, subcommittee meetings, etc. where legislative business is conducted, no matter how secret or confidential the content is, will be open and available to the monitoring of the Constitutional Council.
The Constitutional Council, which is designed to be impartial and devoid of political power, is needed to serve as the final arbiter, on behalf of We the People, to ensure that the legislative process is open, fair, and above board.
The outrages against proper and orderly legislative process invoked in the passage of ObamaCare alone are sufficient to justify putting the Constitutional Council in charge of the rules for the legislative process. It was the culmination of decades of defining the legislative process downwards via secret backroom deals, special exceptions to the rules, special exceptions to the special exceptions, etc. There has also been for years a growing and now widespread practice of legislators at the last moment secretly slipping into vast and out-of-control bills special extra clauses that alter the intent of laws, or that address some irrelevant matter the congressman could not otherwise get enacted, or that provide “bacon” for favored home constituents, etc. Such practices, while completely corrupt, have become increasingly common and without any means for correction or retribution.
All such corruption must be stopped, if there is to be any basis for the restoration of faith in our government.
And yet it has become completely clear that neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives can be relied upon to rectify their behavior. An appalling example of this was demonstrated when Harry Reid arbitrarily and unilaterally flushed away the filibuster with its 200 years of precedence in the Senate so that Obama could, without any effective check, pack the DC circuit court with Liberal partisan judges so that his new radical Federal regulations could have an easier time deflecting legal challenges. By now it should be obvious that the regulation of the legislature is simply not an appropriate task to be entrusted to the legislature.
