House Republicans read the Constitution on the House floor Tuesday morning, following through — though delayed — on a pledge Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made after the GOP won control of the chamber last year.
McCarthy in November — before winning the Speaker’s gavel — wrote on Twitter that lawmakers would “read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House” during “the very first day of the new Republican-led Congress.”
On Tuesday, more than one month into the new Congress, McCarthy made good on that promise.
“This morning we will read the full text of the United States Constitution. The text read today reflects the changes to the Constitution made by the 27 amendments. Those portions superseded by amendment will not be read,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on the House floor.
McCarthy kicked off the reading, which ran for slightly more than 40 minutes.
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America,” he said.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Republican Reps. Kevin Kiley (Calif.), Ben Cline (Va.), Laurel Lee (Fla.), Nathaniel Moran (Texas), Mike Johnson (La.), Russell Fry (S.C.), Harriet Hageman (Wyo.) also read portions of the Constitution.
In addition to McCarthy’s November tweet, House Republicans passed a rules package last month that said, “The Speaker may recognize a Member for the reading of the Constitution on any legislative day through February 28, 2023.”
House lawmakers first recited the Constitution from the floor of the chamber in 2011, according to The Washington Post. That time, however, the reading was bipartisan — then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) recited the first lines of the document, followed by then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Republicans won control of the House in November, though by a far smaller margin than was initially expected. The GOP controls the chamber with 222 seats, and Democrats occupy 212 seats.
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FLASHBACK 12 YEARS to 2011:
The Huffington Post has proven no friend to conservatives or fair journalism, however, this article is interesting by way of flashback and Constitutional snarkiness. So 2023 is the second time in hundreds of years that the Constitution is read aloud into the record! Yippee.
Hey maybe they could start each week reading their “CONTRACT” with us We the People? Maybe that way they might remember the terms of the Agreement?
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WASHINGTON – And on the second day of Republican rule, the House read the Constitution.
Those wondering whether the reading would be dramatic found out on Thursday as volunteers gave voice to the seven articles and 27 amendments that make up the nation’s governing document.
Republicans have made strict adherence to the Constitution a key tenet of their effort to reduce the size of the federal government. The House GOP will reportedly make it a requirement that all new bills put forth in the legislative body include “a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation.”
The Washington Post reported last week that reading the founding document in full appears to be a first in the chamber’s 221-year history:
Call it the tea party-ization of Congress….These are two standout changes on a long list of new rules Republicans will institute in the House when they assume the majority on Jan. 5. After handing out pocket-size Constitutions at rallies, after studying the document article by article and after demanding that Washington return to its founding principles, tea party activists have something new to applaud. A pillar of their grass-roots movement will become a staple in the bureaucracy that governs Congress.
Politics Daily recently reported:
Beyond its symbolic power, however, it is unclear what impact the new rule will have upon the nation. Under axiomatic legal precedent, virtually all congressional action is presumed valid anyway, at least initially. Moreover, by taking their oaths of office, lawmakers swear to abide by the Constitution, and virtually all legislation is vetted for constitutional support on some level by government lawyers before it makes it to committee or to the floor of the House. It is also quite obvious, from 223 years of legal and political debate on the topic, that the text of the Constitution itself, including those portions that deal with legislative power, is susceptible to many different (and often evolving) views and interpretations, a practical reality that would likely render most “Constitutional Authority Statements” controversial and contentious.
Snarky? – “It costs $1.1 million to read!!”
According to Peter Keating at Vanity Fair, $1.1 million is the estimated cost of GOP plans to read the document on the House floor.
The amount I get is nearly $1.1 million. $1,071,872.87, to be exact, though of course this is more back-of-the-envelope than exact. When one chamber of Congress is in session but not working, we the people still have to pay for members’ salaries and expenses, and for their police protection, and for keeping their lights and phones and coffee machines on.
“We always hear members of Congress talking about swearing an oath to represent their constituents, when in reality the only oath we take is to the Constitution,” explained newly-minted Speaker John Boehner to the Post.
For the rest of the article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-constitution-reading_n_805167
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https://www.usdebtclock.org/
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