There is NO pocket veto of the notary bill, it appears. We may have been snookered.

the pocket veto only works if Congress is adjourned.
The Senate is still in session, only the House has been adjourned.
See: http://www.opencongress.org/, which shows that for today , Senate is in session, legally.

From 4closurefraud web site:

Congress is in pro forma – meaning that they are conducting meetings but no formal business is addressed in the meetings. Pro forma can be used to prevent the president from exercising his pocket veto.
I am thinking we have not yet won this battle – we still need to continue with the pressure. the president has 10 days (not counting Sundays) to either sign the bill, veto the bill, or return the bill unsigned. If the session is ended and a bill is returned unsigned then it fails. However, with Congress in pro forma, they are still there and they can pass the unsigned bill.
This is really a very sticky situation we have right now. The president received the bill on Sept. 30 + 10 days = Oct. 12.

Everyone is reporting that Congress has adjourned – but they really haven’t – they are in pro forma session. If they continue in pro forma through Oct 12, then the prez has to veto the bill – otherwise it will be law

http://4closurefraud.org/2010/10/08/action-alert-is-pres-obamas-pocket-veto-on-h-r-3808-possibly-ineffective/

We have until next Tuesday to raise hell on the phones, etc.

If anyone knows different FACTS than the above, please share them.

the pocket veto sticks...I have no idea if that's true or not. Anyone?

with a statement of his objections. He is therefore pocket vetoing the bill AND actually vetoing the bill.

that would be a good choice with elections around the corner.

The House was the originator, so a veto would be returned to the House.

The Senate did not officially adjourn to prevent recess appointments by the President. It has nothing to do with this bill. Trust me, President Obama has very good advisors who actually know how these things all work. The web site you linked to, apparently, does not.

Another poster has already posted this. You are relying on unreliable websites and are being fed propaganda. FUD.

I don't think this is something Obama is "trying to get away with" or anything like that.

I'm sure he's well-advised as to the legalities and will act accordingly. Don't get upset until there's really something to get upset about! We have plenty of issues that qualify!

overflowing big time and running over.

fear, uncertainty, and doubt, too. That's what this tempest-in-a-teapot is. Pure FUD. Written by people who don't know or don't care about the facts about how our government works. The ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, is palpable.

Read the Constitution. If you do that, you'll understand that this is a bogus concern. Do you think the President and his legal advisors have not read that document and understand it? Really?

instance it's unwarranted. Obama wouldn't let this "slip through" and risk further outrage from his base just before the mid-terms, and I have faith that his legal counsel is more on top of it than we could hope to be in our interpretation.

crowd!

Unless he signs it, it's DOA.

If Congress is in session and Obama doesn't sign the bill, it becomes law after 10 days. http://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/pocket_veto.htm

Congress is NOT the Senate by itself nor is it the House by itself, in order for Congress to be IN session, both must be present and without either having passed an adjournment resolution.

In the US, Congress is a bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States of America, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Expect to see more of this as the boys get desperate to hang on to power.

which contains a lot of discussion and opinions.
Seems there is an interesting variance on how the pocket veto works.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9281723

The Senate IS in session, according to a variety of reliable sources.
So Congress is not adjourned, just the House.
Apparently Reid left the Senate in session to avoid recess appointments
( gee, I thought he was a Dem).

I'm betting that the President and his advisors knows more about it than some random FUD website. Whaddya think?

:shrug:

The constitution provides that a president can veto a bill by returning it to the house of Congress that originated the bill. It goes on to explain if the president can't return the bill to the house that originated it, the president can prevent the bill from becoming law by simply not signing it.

Therefore,with respect to HR 3808 the first question under the Constitution is did the chamber of Congress that originated the bill (in the case the House) adjourn prior to the expiration of ten days (excluding Sundays) following the presentment of the bill to the President? Whether or not the Senate had adjourned isn't relevant because (as several other posters in this thread has pointed out) what matters is whether or not the president can return the bill to the chamber from which it originated.

Second, and this is trickier, is the question of whether the House and/or Senate is considered to have "adjourned" for purposes of the veto clause of the Constitution when it recesses but does not adjourn "sine die" (sine die means without a day for reconvening, i.e., a final adjournment, as distinguished from a simple recess where a date for Congress to return to work is set). The extreme position is that for veto clause purposes an adjournment only can occur when Congress adjourns sine die at the end of the second session of Congress (which is the point at which all legislation introduced in that congress not yet enacted dies). A more moderate view is that adjourning sine die at the end of either the first or second sessions of Congress consitutes an adjournment for veto clause purposes. The executive branch for many years has taken the position that any adjournment of more than 3 days allows pocket vetoes. If they were wrong about this, then in fact not returning the bill within ten days during a recess could mean the bill became law. However, the solution that has evolved to this conflict in interpreations is for the White House to announce that it has "pocket vetoed" a bill during an intrasession recess but at the same time, to engage in the technique known as a "protective return" by sending the bill back to the House clerk unsigned within the ten day (plus sundays) period. I expect that is what the Obama administration is doing and I expect that the administration will continue to refer to this as a pocket veto and the House will refer to it as return veto and life will go on. And those suggesting that somehow the veto wasn't effective will simply be revealing their lack of understanding of the law and history of the veto process.

The Huffington Post
OCTOBER 8, 2010


Robert J. SpitzerDistinguished Service Professor, Political Science, SUNY Cortland, and author of 13 books
Posted: October 8, 2010 02:00 PM
President Obama: Veto Yes; Pocket Veto, No!

Mr. President, your October 7 announcement that you plan to veto a bill that has as its stated, and seemingly unexceptional purpose, of streamlining the recognition of notarized statements across state lines will be welcomed by consumer groups and others who fear that the bill would make it tougher for homeowners to challenge improper foreclosure attempts. And your stated justification -- that you "believe it is necessary to have further deliberations about the intended and unintended impact of this bill on consumer protections, including those for mortgages" -- expresses a perfectly sensible caution.

But Mr. President, your intention, as repeated in news reports, to employ a pocket veto instead of a regular or return veto, is flat-out wrong, and there are three reasons why. First, the Constitution prefers the regular or return veto over the pocket veto. We know this because the framers emphatically and repeatedly rejected giving the president an absolute or no-override veto. In fact, the reconsideration of hastily conceived legislation was a prime concern of the framers. It is why they viewed the veto as a constructive power -- not merely the president saying "no" -- that would give both the president and Congress one final chance to improve legislation.

Second, the pocket veto -- which is absolute in its effect, because the bill dies without being returned to Congress -- can only be exercised under two conditions, described in Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution: the first is congressional adjournment, and the second is that bill return is "prevented." Yes, Congress has adjourned, but not sine die (literally, "without a day"). According to the Office of the House Parliamentarian, the House is in adjournment until November 15. Under Clause 2(h) of Rule II of the Rules of the House, the Clerk of the House is empowered to receive veto messages and other communications. This procedure has been used thousands of times for decades, and has passed constitutional muster. So if, as I say, the framers rejected an absolute veto for the president, why does he have the pocket veto, which is absolute in its effect? The answer was to prevent Congress from ducking a veto by passing a bill and quickly adjourning to avoid an anticipated veto, which depends on bill return. (Without the pocket veto, an objectionable bill would become law after ten days with or without the president's signature.)

Third, you can return the bill, H.R. 3808, to its house of origin, just as you said in your public statement. Therefore, that is what you must do if you intend to veto -- treat this as a regular or return veto. The constitutional procedures are clear, and so is your course of action.

Finally, if your intention to utilize a so-called "protective return" pocket veto (where the president returns the bill to Congress, but calls it a pocket veto not subject to override), as you did for the only other bill you have vetoed as president, that procedure is plainly extra-constitutional, utterly suspect, and completely unnecessary. The Constitution does not give presidents the option of choosing, or worse inventing, a veto method. Repeating that mistake would be worse than no veto at all.

Spitzer is the author of The Presidential Veto among other books.

I had not seen it.

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