Technically there is no such thing as an "illegal" bill. First, a bill isn't anything until it passes, at which point it becomes the law, which is by definition legal. There are unconstitutional laws, which it is up to the judicial branch (and ultimately the Supreme Court) to strike down.
Calling a law illegal is an oxymoron and logically impossible.
Also remember that the President doesn't introduce legislation, per the Constitution. Only Members of Congress can do that. Of course, the President can go hand a senator or representative a draft of a bill and said congressman can toss it into the hat, so the difference is somewhat trivial, but it is still an important point of procedure.
Technically, if the Pres can't find anyone in Congress to sponsor a bill, it won't ever get introduced, but that rarely happens.
edited 26th Jan '12 7:38:49 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"But a constitution is, by definition, the highest law of a country, so, yes, there actually are illegal laws - laws that should never have been passed in the first place, because they violate the constitution, are hence unconstitutional - and hence illegal.
Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 FanficIn principle you're right. In practice, there are important technical distinctions between constitutionality and legality — the Constitution itself contains no laws at all. It is Congress' job to use the authority granted by the Constitution to make laws. So Congress can pass a law that is unconstitutional, but not illegal by the literal definition. Also, the Executive branch can refuse to enforce a law that it believes is unconstitutional, but the Judiciary can issue an order compelling enforcement.
Illegality implies that one pays a penalty for violating something, and the President does not have authority to send the police to Congress to arrest people for passing bad laws, nor can you sue Congress for passing a bad law.
To help, I can provide an example. The Constitution says that ex post facto laws shall not be passed — that is, you cannot retroactively make something a crime and then arrest someone for it. Suppose that Congress has some kind of PETA-sponsored moral panic attack and passes a law saying that owning a pet cat is illegal. Not only that, but if you owned a cat at any time during the past twenty years, you go to jail as well.
That law is unconstitutional; it blatantly violates ex post facto. However, nobody in Congress will go to jail for passing it. At most it could be found that they committed ethical violations in the process of getting it passed — maybe PETA bribed people. That would be illegal because we have a law against it. Furthermore, because the law was passed and added to the books, it actually was/will be illegal to own a cat retroactively, until the Supreme Court (or more probably, the first appeals court that hears a case under that law) strikes it down.
edited 26th Jan '12 7:51:43 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I suppose it might be worth asking how different that is from just filling the supreme court with judges whose opinions are more similar to your own...
"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon StewartWell first of all, a President doesn't get to choose when a spot opens on the Supreme Court, so "packing" it is pretty hard.
Second, since nominees are subject to Senate confirmation, a President is generally reluctant to nominate people that they know or suspect to be too radical.
Third, it takes five out of the nine Justices to overturn a lower court decision.
Fourth, once a person actually gets onto the Court, the President has no control whatsoever over how the person is going to vote in the future.
Fifth, and probably most important, getting a case to the Supreme Court is extremely hard. Remember, with very few exceptions, in order to get there, a case has to have passed either through the lower Federal trial courts and courts of appeal, or through a State's Supreme Court. If you do petition them for a writ of certiorari, they only take about 100 cases out of several thousand petitions. And of those cases, they tend to be big questions that haven't been settled by previous Courts, and that are the subject of major disagreement among the lower courts. A Supreme Court will almost never reconsider a question of law that it decided recently. Stare Decisis, after all.
edited 26th Jan '12 11:10:37 AM by Lawyerdude
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Of course it he tried to pass a bill that was blatantly illegally, everyone in congress would just refuse to pass it, right?
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