I guess the Republicans have given up on the half-assed "drive a wedge between Clinton and Obama supporters" strategy.

Greg is right. It is the timing.

This issue has been addressed before and a successful work around created. It kind of reminds me of the argument that John McCain couldn't be president because he was born on a navy base in Panama.

I'm troubled by the characterization of people who seek to uphold the Constitution as "wingnuts". I'm very much in favor of Hillary's becoming SoS, but I'm even more in favor of our Constitution. Unless we are willing to say that some constitutional provisions are more worthy of enforcement than others, we should not be dismissing advocates of this position with name calling. And once we start going down the road of claiming that some constitutional provisions are just technicalities or are archaic, where do we stop? And who gets to decide? If you don't like the provision, the remedy is to amend the Constitution to remove it, not to ignore it - and certainly not to call people names when they point out that the Constitution might get in the way of what we would like to see happen. I detest "wingnuts" as much as the next liberal, but we don't do our side any favors when we begin to act like them.

So, fine, if Judicial Watch to take the "Saxbe fix" to court, let them. I have no doubt of the outcome. The only question is whether the case will actually be heard at all or whether they will simply be deemed to lack standing to sue.

This strikes me as one of those clauses that will be rendered unenforceable by the Political Question Doctrine. There are certain Constitutional questions that the courts will not handle because they belong exclusively to the political branches. The classic case is the clause in the Constitution that says "Congress shall guarantee to each state a republican form of government." In Luther v. Borden, the Supreme Court said that it was up to Congress and not the courts to decide whether a state government is "republican." I suspect they would have a similar attitude to this issue.

I think it's utterly unhelpful to insult and question the motives of people who point out that the Constitution says what it says. This isn't some tendentious reading of a technicality -- this is an entire clause which specifically speaks to appointing sitting members of Congress to government jobs. If you want to say it should be changed, that's fine, but if you say it doesn't really count or the only people who say it counts are wingnuts, that's just dishonest.

I would like anyone all the literalists who think this is a valid constitutional issue to first tell me whether a person exceeding the speed limit to get a severely injured person to the hospital should be convicted of violating said law.

Laws are not just words in books. They're an agreed-upon code designed to proscribe certain behaviors we deem undesirable. The "fix" in this case is not just a technical fix. It effectively prevents the behavior this clause was intended to prevent. There is ample precedent for it. All laws require interpretation, otherwise they're just so many words; and there's nothing in the emoluments clause to prevent interpretation in such a way that rescinding the pay raise to previous levels satisfies the clause's requirement.

There is precedent to fixing it with a simple reversal of the pay increase. Which is good becasue I doubt anyone has standing to challenge it in court.

I'd like to clarify a few things. First, in defending the constitutional argument that is being raised by Judicial Watch, I (and as far as I can tell, all the others who expressed some form of agreement with me) did not mean to disparage the feasibility of the "fix" that is being proposed. In fact, it sounds pretty good to me. So in calling an argument "horseshit" (which is such a well-reasoned argument), please distinguish between the initial constitutional argument and the "fix" that is being proposed.

Second, the fact that a court (most importantly the Supreme Court) might decline to decide an issue, based on the Political Question doctrine, does not mean that we should breeze right past it and not worry about violations. The Political Question doctrine relies on the (hopefully reasonable) belief that the judiciary isn't the only branch that is concerned with and is sworn to uphold the Constitution. It relies on the good faith of the other branches in carrying out their duties, and it should not give us a free pass to violate provisions we find inconvenient.

Do we really think that the Obama folks didnt look at this particular clause before nominating Hillary? after all, the president is a constitutional lawyer

I see enormous irony in supporters of a president-elect, who was at one time a constitutional lawyer, racing past honest debate about a little understood Constitutional clause and its implications. The Emoluments clause was designed to discourage corruption and self-dealing in an age when the types of misbehavior the clause addresses was a serious source of corruption in British politics. The use of clever Saxbe fix, while a feel-good option in the past and the likely course of action today, doesn't undo events, restore the legality to an appointment in the face of the emolumentary adjustments, or address the core issue; i.e., how do we hew to our Constitutional protections against government corruption?

When I put a caramel in my mouth and chew, all my words sound like "emoluments".