The Tea Party meltdown over John Boehner’s re-election as House Speaker is in full throttle already with several conservative websites, such as World Net Daily (WND) and Tea Party News Network (TPNN) publishing hate-filled articles about their failed coup and the impending demise of the Republican Party.
The ultra-conservative yahoos at WND were particularly vested in the ouster of Speaker Boehner as they were earning revenue from garbage they were selling online as part of their “DON’T BE YELLOW: DUMP BOEHNER NOW! CAMPAIGN” available at their superstore at the AMAZING LOW PRICE of only $29.95 (although for the life of me, I cannot figure out if there is even anything to purchase, or if it is more of an opportunity to donate money to WND). Or, if you prefer you can purchase the amazing DON’T BE YELLOW: DUMP BOEHNER NOW! Magnetic or Adhesive Bumper Sticker so you too can be part of the politics for profit fest, hosted by WND.
Anyway, I digress. After whimpering about their collection of 560,000 letters to House Representatives demanding an end to the Boehner Regime – “or a stack that will be nearly 19 stories tall on delivery” – they proposed an interesting, albeit totally ridiculous, solution to the dilemma: “take a simple vote.”
But how can this be, you might ask, knowing that as WND concedes at the outset “There may be no precedent for removing a sitting House speaker.”
What they did was find a short article written by a left-leaning Constitutional expert “Constitutional expert and former Brookings Institute senior staff member” that wrote “[I]t’s generally believed that a Speaker can be removed, which would be executed by a Member offering a resolution declaring the Office of the Speaker vacant.”
That expert, Dr. Kenneth A. Gold, cites support for this notion:
The Jefferson Manual, written by Thomas Jefferson when he was Vice President, and used by the House as a supplement to its standing rules, in Section 9 states that “A Speaker may be removed at the will of the House and a Speaker pro tempore appointed.”
What WND forgets to tell its readers (and they noticeable forgot to cite the source for their excerpt from Gold) is that Gold goes on to write:
But even that clause may not necessarily apply to removing a Speaker, as it follows examples of Speakers being replaced due to illness, and the appointing of Speakers pro tempore in those instances.
But wait, it gets better because while Gold may be an accredited professor with expertise in “Federal and Defense Budget, Working with Congress, Federal Workers Issues and Inspectors General” he is clearly not an expert on the law.
See, what Gold overlooked was the fact that Jefferson had two citations supporting that statement, neither of which parallel the situation concerning John Boehner’s tenure as Speaker. [feel free to go checkout The Jefferson Manual for yourself]
Those citations, as annotated in The Jefferson Manual read: 2 Grey 186. 5 Grey 134 and refer to entries from volume 2 and 5 of a book of British Parliamentary transcripts entitled Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, London, 1769, in 10 volumes, written by Anchitell Grey.
And this is where Gold’s analysis breaks down. In short, in court cases judges “distinguish cases,” meaning they can issue a ruling that the holding or legal reasoning of a precedent case will not apply due to materially different facts between the two cases.
Yahoo Answers provides an outstanding example of this in action:
For example, if your current case is a contract dispute, and opposing counsel says the case of Smith v. Thompson should be controlling, you might want to distinguish by pointing out that the defendant in the Smith case was a minor, which is the reason why the Court ruled that the contract is not enforceable, whereas in the present case the defendant is an adult who has the capacity to enter a contract.
Long story short, both of Jefferson’s citations are easily distinguished from the current circumstances regarding Speaker Boehner’s leadership of the House. Both cases deal with violations of the separation of powers between the monarch (the “sovereign” as they put it in the first instance and the “King” in the second) and the House of Commons.
Briefly, in the first citation from Volume 2, page 186, the House of Commons debated whether the current Speaker could serve in that capacity as he also served the “sovereign” as a member of the Privvy Council, consisting of the King or Queen’s tenants in chief [1] and other advisers. In that context, the legal question at issue was whether the Speaker could serve the interests of the House of Commons while serving as a direct adviser to the reigning monarch. In this instance the Speaker survived a vote to oust him.
The second instance, from Volume 5, page 134 was similar in that the debate was centered around whether or not a Speaker had the authority to adjourn the House of Commons with no debate at the instruction of the King or whether he must allow debate. In that instance. the Speaker, Baron John Finch, continued as Speaker and the King later dissolved Parliament. As a footnote, he was impeached as lord keeper and Baron of Fordwich, about 11 years after leaving the House of Commons.
FOOTNOTE:
1. In medieval and early modern Europe the term tenant-in-chief (or vassal-in-chief), denoted a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy. SOURCE
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