Is 'No Budget, No Pay' Unconstitutional?

Christian Post ^ | 01/24/2013 | Napp Nazworth

[OneWingedShark]

Technically there is no money to pay their salaries.

Bingo

[xzins]

First, there is no constitutional provision that a budget be produced. That is a matter of law passed by Congress in a constitutional manner.

There is a constitutional provision that legislators be compensated. As Marlowe points out, the House desires a law that defines the conditions that must be met in order to receive that compensation. In other words, merely being elected doesn’t entitle them to the compensation, but doing the job does. And not doing a particular, legally based part of the job will have that pay withheld.

[Amendment10]

Thanks for your comment xzins.

Regarding the constitutionality of this issue, I am in error concerning my knee-jerk comment about the title of this thread, the “no pay” part, as apposed to basing my comment on what the bill(?) actually says, which I haven’t read. Assuming peacetime “part time” duties with respect to administering Congress’s constitutionally-limited powers, the Constitution guarantees lawmakers compensation for their services (1.6.2).

But my main concern about this thread is that the pay issue is nothing more than an unprofessional publicitiy stunt, imo, likely meant to impress voters who are probably mostly Constitution-ignorant.

[Amendment10]

I will note an important thing about the federal budget which I have mentioned in related threads. Justice John Marshall had taken the Founding States' division of federal and state government powers a major leap forward, imo, when he officially clarified Congress's limited power to lay taxes.

More specifically, Justice Marhall had clarifed that Congress is prohibited from laying takes in the name of state power issues, issues which Congress cannot justify under the Constitution's Section 8 of Article I, or other constitutionally express expenses.

"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." --Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

Here is my rough estimate of how much Congress's Article I, Section 8-limited powers should be costing taxpayers per year. Given that the plurality of clauses in Section 8 are defense related, and given that Department of Defense (DoD) budget for 2011 was $600+ billion, I will generously round up the DoD annual budget to $1 trillion, but probably much less, as an estimate of how much taxpayers should be paying Congress annually to fulfil its Section 8 duties.

In other words, we should not be hearing about multi-trillion dollar annual budgets that Obama guard dog Fx News and other pro-Obama "news" media are reporting in federal public policy discussions without mentioning Justice Marshall's clarification of Congress's limited power to lay taxes.

So Congress's "No budget, no pay" stunt beautifully sidesteps Congress's Section 8-limited powers imo.