The Constitution Says Hillary Cannot Be Appointed

A caller to Brian Sussman’s show tonight had an interesting point. Article I, Section 6 of the constitution says, in part:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time[.]

Since the Secretary of State was given a raise (the emolument having been encreased) during Hillary’s term in the Senate, and since she still is a Senator, that means she cannot be appointed to that position. The Founders specifically did not want the corruption that would come from voting to create or give a raise to a nice job and then taking it.

For an Obama administration, which doesn’t understand the role of judges and will no doubt be quite content to pretend that certain Amendments are devoid of meaning, this will surely be but a speed bump. But the language seems clear to me.

Update:

Apparently Volokh thinks the wording is “ambiguous”, but cites two law professors who agree with me. Mickey Kaus has the rim shot:

It’s Not the Cold War

You need to read Mark Steyn.

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.