Watchdog’s lawsuit halted

The Supreme Court Monday declined to hear an appeal of a government watchdog’s lawsuit seeking to overturn a 2006 budget law with a checkered past.

The Court’s choice not to consider Public Citizen’s lawsuit likely brings to a close a nearly two-year-long fight to tear down the Deficit Reduction Act, a controversial measure that cut federal spending by $39 billion and was marred by a clerical error and questions about its constitutionality.

{mosads}At the time of the typo snafu, congressional Democrats protested that the then-Republican majority and the White House were playing fast and loose with the Constitution and trampling on the then-minority party’s rights. Public Citizen and others filed lawsuits to get the statute invalidated.

The Public Citizen case is one of several brought against that statute, but it was the first to reach the Supreme Court. In all the cases, lower courts upheld the law based on an 1892 Supreme Court ruling that, according to the decisions in the Deficit Reduction Act cases, limits the judiciary’s authority to intervene in legislative disputes.

The Supreme Court does not comment on its reasons for declining to take up appeals. But the consistency of the lower-court rulings on the Deficit Reduction Act strongly suggests the high court would make the same determination about other pending appeals.

Public Citizen attorney Allison Zieve expressed disappointment and resignation over the court’s decision.

“Not only was it our last chance to prevail, but we’d also thought that the Supreme Court was our best chance,” she said.

The group filed its lawsuit in April 2006, and the federal district court in D.C. ruled against it in August 2006. Later, in May 2007, an appeals court upheld that decision.

At issue in the case is a clerical error introduced during the enrollment of the bill — leading to the House and Senate passing slightly different language — and the congressional Republican leadership’s response to the error.

After the Senate passed the conference version of the Deficit Reduction Act in late 2005, a clerk mistakenly altered the language in a section of the bill on Medicare subsidies for oxygen equipment rentals, leading the House to vote in February 2006 on a slightly different version.

The Senate passed language setting a 36-month limit on oxygen rentals, while the House version would have set the limit at 13 months. The Senate-passed version reflected congressional intent.

Congressional Republican leaders and the White House maintained that Democrats were merely making political hay out of a minor error and that the version of the bill sent to President Bush was valid because it was certified by then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and then-Senate President pro tempore Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

The bill itself passed by the narrowest margin, receiving no Democratic votes in the House or Senate and requiring Vice President Cheney to cast a tiebreaking vote.