Mortgage Bailout Skirts Rules, Constitution

In “The Harry Reid Protection Racket,” the Washington Examiner yesterday explained how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid flouted Senate rules to get the bloated mortgage bailout bill, which rips off taxpayers, passed by the Senate.   Flouting “two centuries of parliamentary tradition requiring that all Senate bills be open to amendments,” Reid used bogus amendments to drown out real ones, in order to prevent lawmakers from even voting on amendments to protect taxpayers, such as Senator Jim DeMint’s amendment to limit lobbying by the government-backed mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who are the biggest beneficiaries of the bailout

Although the fraud-ridden mortgage giant Fannie Mae is run by liberal power-brokers, and the mortgage bailout bill subsidizes left-wing groups like ACORN, even the liberal blog Daily Kos concedes that the mortgage bailout bill circumvented the Constitution’s Origination Clause, which requires that taxes originate in the House, not the Senate.  The bill got around the Origination Clause by putting into the shell of an unrelated House bill taxes that actually originated in the Senate.