Posted on 03/16/2009 4:39:15 AM PDT by wombtotomb
Yet George Washington accepted gifts from foreign ambassadors, in the name of the people of the United States, as have all successors.
I believe that gifts from foreign dignitaries are accepted, as you say, but the nominal recipient of such a gift has to buy them from the US government if he wants to keep it. Otherwise it goes to a museum, I believe.
Article I, Section 6, Clause 2: "no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office."
The titles-of-nobility restriction does not apply to members of Congress, period.
Even if it did, as others have pointed out on this thread, it is OK to do this with the consent of Congress. Congress has consented for a lot of other things, like presidents getting gifts from foreign dignitaries.
No, I do not know if congress gave consent, and I didn't imply that he was in violation one way or another. What I did say is that you didn't read all of the article(the article from the constitution)and tried to make it appear that he was free and clear because it was a violation only if the president bestowed title on him. I told you that this wasn't true, and I notice that several others told you the same. They were just nicer about it than I was. However, I don't do nice when it comes to people trying to apologize for a**hats like Kennedy and other communists we have serving in the Government of the USA. Take that however you wish.
One of my friends is a retired (mid 1970s retirement) military officer. He was invited in the early 1990s to serve as a guest lecturer at a foreign "state university". He was required to get permission from either the service or congress (I forget which) in order take the job, as it constituted receiving an "emolument" from a "foreign State".
I would think the MSM would cover it wall to wall, to spin it to their advantage, especially since O has screwed up with them so bad lately.....
The idea that the Founding Fathers would prohibit Executive and Judiciary branch officers from receiving foreign honors (read bribes) but would allow them to Legislative branch members is absurd on its face. All such honors have to be consented to by Congress.
The British were never too happy about that Revolution for independence thing and losing control over this part of the world so, they found ways to apply their influence here in a more covert ways.
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=WorldOrder&Entity=CityLondon
Except that it doesn't say "holding any other office," it just says "holding any office."
(It also doesn't preclude holding offices in two branches the way you said it--there is nothing keeping someone from being an executive and judicial officer at the same time, as John Marshall and John Jay each were, briefly.)
Same with the part from Article II that I cited before, restricting membership in the Electoral College ("no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector"). It only makes sense if a seat in Congress is not considered an office of the United States.
Also see Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, where the process for appointing all "officers of the United States" is spelled out. This obviously doesn't include members of Congress, who are elected. Next is Section 3, where the president is given the duty to commission all officers of the United States. He doesn't commission members of Congress.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment also makes the distinction.
Bottom line: Ted Kennedy is not an "officer of the United States" as the Constitution uses that term of art.
Please. The Founding Fathers wanted members of Congress to be bribed by foreign princes and powers?
No offense, but that's a pretty liberal way to interpret the Constitution: it would be bad, so it must be unconstitutional. They presumably wouldn't have wanted state officials to be bribed by foreign powers, but they left them out too (despite other restrictions in Article I, Section 10).
It's not that they wanted members of Congress to be bribed. It's that when it comes to members of Congress, the Framers were content to leave things to the voters in a way that they weren't for executive and judicial officers. There are other examples of this--for instance, the original Constitution restricted presidential pay raises, but not congressional ones (not until the 1990s, when the 27th Amendment was ratified), relying instead on the voters to throw the bums out. In retrospect not the best design in the world, but it's the one they picked.
Kalt is absolutely correct. Senators and Representatives are *not* “Officers of the United States,” and do not hold an “Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States,” as the terms are used in the Constitution. The examples that Kalt gives, in this and prior posts, of the Constitution treating Senators and Representatives as being creatures wholly different from Officers of the United States are right on the money, but he forgot to mention another example that clarifies even further that that is the case.
The Constitution provides that Officers of the United States are subject to impeachment, and an officer that is impeached (by the House) and convicted (by the Senate) is disqualified from ever again holding an Office of Honor, Trust and Profit under the United States. However, it is clear from the text and history of the Constitution that members of Congress are *not* subject to impeachment, and instead are subject to expulsion upon the vote of 2/3 of the members of the house in question (but expelled members are not disqualified from holding future office-—the Framers wanted to avoid the abuses committed by Parliament against John Wilkes). Moreover, an Officer of the United States that is impeached and convicted is disqualified from ever again serving in an Office of Honor, Trust and Profit under the United States-—e.g., he can’t be a federal judge, or an ambassador, or Secretary of Agriculture-—but he is *not* disqualified from serving in Congress. For the past 16 years, the halls of Congress have been sullied by the presence of Congressman Alcee Hastings, who was impeached and convicted for bribery when he was a federal judge but was elected to the House in 1992 and biennially thereafter. Believe me, if being a member of the House or Senate was an Office of Honor, Trust and Profit under the United States, Alcee Hastings would not have been seated in Congress, if not in January 1993 then in January 1995 (when Newt Gingrich took over). House Republicans knew that the only way to get rid of him was to get 2/3 of the House to vote to expel him, or else beat him at the polls, and both were political impossibilities (the FL-23 is an overwhelmingly Democrat, black-majority district).
Somtetimes the Constitution doesn’t say what we want it to say, but the Framers usually have a pretty good reason for it. Here, they wanted the People to have the right to elect to Congress whomever they wanted as long as their choice met the bare qualifications of age, residency in the state, and years of citizenship.
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