So President Obama has pledged to veto HR 3808, the e-notarization bill that was so incredibly short, and so powerful, that nobody was quite sure what it would do.

It passed both houses of congress on votes with no records attached (voice vote in house, Unanimous consent in Senate), so nobody had to go on record for voting for it; did you know that could be done on a major bill? Fascinating.

The bill in question passed the Senate on Sept. 27 by unanimous consent. The House passed the bill by “voice vote” in April. Many bills that aren’t considered controversial pass this way, with members of both parties essentially letting it move through Congress without debate.

Pfft, ‘uncontroversial’, huh?

At its core, HR 3808 is a brazen, illogical, irrational power-grab by the Federal government over the states. Basically, it opens the bottom up on notary seals at a national level, much like credit card de-reg did for that industry; whatever the cheapest, easiest, laziest, most industry friendly state on notarization is, that’s where everyone will get everything notarized, and all other states have to approve it.

But beyond that, and this is where it gets murky – it might also force a new and undeserved legal status akin to public records on notarized documents, and it could, in some interpretations, allow retroactive, forged notarizations to be made legal.

Call me a skeptic, but I expected Obama to sign this one in a hot second. It’s awful policy and terrible politics, which is his recipe for destroying the country; yet he didn’t; seemingly, this is a bridge too far even for the modern Democratic party, and he shelved it back to the House, which seems to be scurrying around in shame looking for a way to fix it.

Hmm.

Beyond the obvious, that Obama has the potential to surprise me, I wonder what this all means. That Congress is a completely vestigial organ of government that may have come within a hair’s breadth of blowing a gaping hole in the legal system? Well, yeah. That our Federal government is run on autopilot by corporate stooges who find it completely uncontroversial to gut state regulations to serve their masters? Duh. That even ‘Progressive’ politicians like Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold are either co-opted or asleep at the switch on important economic matters? Yep.

Keep in mind that the Senate is currently, as of this moment, holding up 420 bills from the House just to be obstructionist jerks. Some of those are ‘uncontroversial’ measures too, like renaming post offices.

But not this one; in a year of gridlock, a bill that just happened to go below the radar and gut important state protections on legal process sailed through in record time.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?