Bookworm Room � The House’s refusal to fund Obamacare is entirely constitutional — and James Madison personally approves this message

Link: http://www.bookwormroom.com/2013/10/03/the-houses-refusal-to-fund-obamacare-is-entirely-constitutional-and-james-madison-personally-approves-this-message/

My stock response to all those liberal Facebook friends who have insisted that the House is "unconstitutionally" holding Obamacare hostage, is that the Founders named it the "House of Representatives" and gave it the power of the purse for a reason.
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The above response came off the top of my head.  If I had studied the Federalist papers recently, however, I could simply have quoted James Madison. one of the Constitution's primary architects, writing in Federalist No. 58 (and a groveling h/t to Tom Elias, of The New Editor, for this brilliant find):

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.  (Emphasis added.)

What the House is doing is entirely constitutional, and we conservatives should be doing our best to trumpet that fact.  Moreover, given the federal takeover of the Lincoln Memorial, we should remind everyone that we live in a nation guaranteed "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  Unlike a monarchy, the federal government doesn't own the properties it is denying us.  Instead, we own the federal government.  The government is merely a caretaker, and a pretty damn surly, ineffectual, greedy, and tyrannical one at that.

And there's also this:
http://nationalreview.com/article/360228/origins-origination-clause-andrew-c-mccarthy

In a Bench Memos post, my friend Matt Franck objects to the contention in my column for last weekend that the Constitution's Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7) gives the House of Representatives primacy over spending as well as taxing. Matt claims that my interpretation is bereft of historical support, a defect I'm said to camouflage by an extravagant reading of an "at best . . . ambiguous" passage in Madison's Federalist No. 58.
It is Matt's history, though, that is incomplete. As Mark Steyn observes, there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of vesting authority over not merely taxing but also spending in the legislative body closest to the people. This tradition, stretching back nearly to the Magna Carta, inspired the Origination Clause. It also informed Madison, whose ruminations, besides being far from ambiguous on the House's power of the purse, are entitled to great weight — not only because he was among the Constitution's chief architects but also because his explication of the Framers' design helped induce skeptics of centralized government and its tyrannical proclivities to adopt the Constitution.
Plainly, Matt is correct that the Origination Clause refers to "bills for raising revenue." From the time it was debated at the Philadelphia convention, however, the concept at issue clearly referred to more than tax bills. It was about reposing in the people, through their most immediately accountable representatives, the power of the purse. Indeed, the term persistently used throughout the Framers' debates was "money bills" — the phrase used by Elbridge Gerry, perhaps the principal advocate of the Origination Clause, when (as the debate records recount) he "moved to restrain the Senatorial branch from originating money bills. The other branch [i.e., the House] was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings."
...The Heritage Foundation's Guide to the Constitution, for example, notes that the clause was meant to be "consistent with the English requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons." Traditionally, that requirement aggregated taxing with spending — the "power over the purse" — which the Framers sought to repose "with the legislative body closer to the people."
Similarly, the Annenberg Institute for Civics, in its series on the Constitution, instructs students that the Clause means "the House of Representatives must begin the process when it comes to raising and spending money. It is the chamber where all taxing and spending bills start" (emphasis added)...

The problem is, though, the Republicans don't seem to remember their pledge to the Constitution.
http://nationalreview.com/article/359767/how-constitutionally-fund-government-andrew-c-mccarthy