Quote:
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Republicans are evoking an obscure Supreme Court ruling from the 1890s to suggest that a bill does not actually have to pass both chambers of Congress to become law.
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odd that the article does not refer to this 'ruling'. I had to look it up and this is what I found:
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/expo...206/news3.html
The basis for this assertion appears to be the case of Field v. Clark, an 1892 Supreme Court ruling.
The plaintiffs argued that a trade-tariffs bill was not law because the respective journals of the House and Senate did not contain explicit proof that the chambers had passed exactly the same bill in 1890 and that a provision was missing from the enrolled bill signed by President Benjamin Harrison.
The plaintiffs argued that the signatures of the Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate are not adequate to establish that the chambers had acted as those officers attested.