Joe Biden’s Dec. 29 signing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 was invalid because the House never actually passed the omnibus spending bill the president purportedly signed into law.
The Senate approved the House’s amendments to the bill on Dec. 22, 2022, and the next day, members of the House met to consider the Senate’s changes.
“The Quorum Clause’s text, the structure of the Constitution, and the longstanding — and until three years ago, unbroken — practice of Congress to conduct its business in-person collectively reinforce that the Constitution forbids proxy voting,” the Texas attorney general alleges in the complaint.
Yet little notice has been paid to the lawsuit, likely because the D.C. Circuit Court had previously rejected then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s challenge to the Pelosi proxy-voting rule.
While in McCarthy v. Pelosi, the Republican leader had also challenged the proxy-voting rule under the quorum clause, that decision has no bearing on Paxton’s lawsuit because the courts never reached the merits of the constitutional argument.
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