Obama: The Constitution Is Bullshit! I WON My Nobel!

Josh Gerstein
The White House is sharply rejecting arguments by two legal scholars that it would be unconstitutional for President Barack Obama to accept the Nobel Peace Prize without approval from Congress.

“This argument is flat out wrong. The Constitution talks about kings and princes and foreign states. Here, Alfred Nobel, a private citizen, set up a private foundation — the Nobel Foundation — that awards the money,” said a White House aide, who asked not to be named. “Furthermore, President Obama has already indicated that he does not intend to keep the money.”

In a Washington Post op-ed Friday, Chapman University law professor Ron Rotunda and Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Peter Pham argue that Obama would run afoul of a little-known clause of the Constitution barring U.S. officials from accepting foreign titles, gifts and the like unless authorized by Congress.

The White House notes that the Constitution’s limits apply only to awards from foreign governments and the $1.4 million prize money comes from Alfred Nobel’s foundation. But the winner of the prize is chosen by a committee handpicked by the Norwegian Parliament — in fact the panel was known for some time as a Parliament committee.

Adam Blickstein makes a good argument here that Congress has already consented to receipt of the award itself by Obama via a statute that’s on the books. However, that law doesn’t explicitly approve of the idea of Obama directing the cash portion of the prize to charities.

For the record, in light of Rotunda and Pham’s claim that the questions they raise were “not discussed, much less adequately addressed anywhere else,” I feel compelled to point out that I raised both the tax issue and the emolument issue a week ago, on the same day Obama won the prize. So did J.P. Friere at the Examiner.

While some call the constitutional clause at issue with the Nobel the emolument clause, that’s confusing because that label is more commonly used to refer to another clause that prohibits an individual from taking an executive branch job if they voted to create or increase pay for the job while in Congress. The clause was in the news earlier this year when then-Sen. Hillary Clinton was nominated to serve as secretary of state. The problem is commonly fixed, as it was in this instance, by passing a law to drop the pay to an earlier level.