Deal done, time to uncork the bubbly

From now till the New Year is going to be a round of partying for all those in America, and India, who have been associated with the Indo-US civil nuclear deal.

US Ambassador David Mulford held a small celebratory dinner at Roosevelt House the night the deal was cleared. Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns was also in Delhi. The air was thick with emotion.

Burns declared Mulford the best Ambassador of the US anywhere in the world and the champagne was popped.

But the party hasn't ended. Mulford is returning to Washington for the formal signing ceremony on Wednesday or Thursday.

Expected to take place at the Rose Garden in the White House, key lawmakers, Indian-American community leaders and others who helped push the Bill through the US Congress will be invited to it.

And what exactly does the American President do when he signs a Bill? No, contrary to speculations in New Delhi, he does not sign and throw his pen away. It is a ceremonial occasion, used to derive much political mileage.

He signed the US Transportation Act in 2005, not at the White House but at the Caterpillar-Aurora facility at Montgomery, Illinois. The occasion was witnessed by thousands of cheering helmeted workers.

The signing itself is with a special pen bearing the White House logo and Presidential seal, which is then gifted to one of the invited guests.

When the number of recipients is more than one, US Presidents have been known to sign their names with as many as a dozen pens, so each guest can have a pen that "officially" signed the deal.

For more than fifty years, pens made by the Parker company were used at White House signing ceremonies. However, the current president uses pens made by another company, Shaeffer.

It is an occasion to be on the same page as the President of the United States. Hence the scramble among Indian-Americans to get invited to the signing.

The Bill "" a law after the President has signed it "" is transmitted to the Archivist of the United States. The Archivist assigns the law a number. The Archivist publishes the law on its own, as a pamphlet.

This is known as a slip law. The slip law contains a lot more than just the text of the law itself, such as where it is to be inserted in the United States Code, if at all, its legislative history, the committees through which it passed, and so on. In effect, the slip law is a historical document in itself.

The law is also published in the United States Statutes at Large, a collection of all laws passed in any given Congress.