Examining the Constitutional Validity of the Speaker's Certification Power vis-à-vis Articles 110 and 122

Article 110 of the Constitution defines a ‘Money Bill’ narrowly, confining it to matters like taxation, borrowing, and the Consolidated Fund, while Article 110(3) further makes the Speaker’s certification of a Bill as a Money Bill. To round off such protection, Article 122 further ensures that the validity of Parliamentary proceedings cannot be called into question on the allegation of “irregularity of procedure”. In recent years, this mechanism has been used to pass legislation with substantial non-financial content (such as the Aadhaar Act, 2016 and provisions of the Finance Act, 2017 that restructured tribunals). Consequently, this has triggered litigation on the constitutional constraints on the same, such as in K.S. Puttuswamy v. Union of India, and Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank, where the Supreme Court expressed serious doubts about the practice but left the matter unresolved, referring it to a larger bench that remains pending. This project examines whether the Speaker’s certification is genuinely beyond judicial review, and whether the unrestrained usage of such power can be justified in terms of constitutional morality.