Suppose that Congress passes some giant 2,000-page-long legislation about protecting endangered species or doing something about climate change - but someone has slipped in a tiny sentence on page 469 of the bill - something outrageous yet still Constitutional - “…and the corporate tax rate shall be reduced to two percent across America…” or "……and the Supreme Court shall be expanded from nine justices to a hundred",…“and the federal minimum wage shall be fifty-five dollars an hour,” etc.
Somehow, nobody else notices this during proofreading, since it’s so tiny, and the bill passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president into law. Does that rider then have the full force of law now?
(AFAIK, the Supreme Court wouldn’t overturn it as un-Constitutional, since there is nothing un-Constitutional about increasing the federal minimum wage, or expanding the Supreme Court, or cutting the corporate tax rate, etc.)
If it was properly passed in the legislative procedure, yes, of course. It would still be subject to judicial review by the courts, and might well be held to be unconstitutional on substantive grounds; but the fact that it slipped in, procedurally, does not make it unconstitutional.
Since one of your examples relates to taxes: In the US Constitution, there is the origination clause, which states that tax laws must originate in the House of Representatives. So if the bill in your question originated in the Senate, and had the tax clause in it at that stage already, then that could be grounds for unconstitutionalty. There is, however, nothing that prevents the Senate from inserting a tax clause into a bill that has already been originated.
The OP treats this as some weird hypothetical and yet I get the impression that this already happens, all the time. Bills are hundreds of pages long and few senators or representatives actually read them.
It certainly does happen. Here are some examples in state rather than federal law: Oklahoma changed their law to make the loser in a civil lawsuit liable for both sides’ legal costs, which was apparently an accident, not intended by anyone involved with the bill. And here Arkansas accidentally eliminated the lower age limit for marriage. And here a legislative fumble eliminated the state plumbing code in Texas.
Not so much a typo as substance. When Ontario went to an online title registry, on of the provisions was that the registry was the final word. Someone impersonated a title-holder and got a mortgage (and then disappeared with the money), which was duly registered against the title in the electronic registry. When the bank noticed they weren’t being paid, they sued, thus discovering he proper owners. Being banks, they had no conscience and it went to court, where the Ontario court held that the law said exactly that - the title registry was the official word, therefore the bank held a mortgage/lien on the property, and it was up to the title-holder to pay off this fraudulent mortgage. The court said if the legislature had intended to allow exceptions for fraud etc., they would have said so.
IIRC, this was subsequently corrected.
From what I’ve read, legislation often contains contradictions and ambiguities. Often this results in corrections passed as subsequent amendments. (One article I read mentioned some interesting flaws in the ACA, and the problem that one party refused to allow any amendments - the normal road to repairs - so these problems never were properly fixed. I think many were fixed as departmental regulations.)
There is a canon of construction called the absurdity doctrine, Plain meaning rule - Wikipedia, where a judge will not enforce a statute according to its literal terms if it would create an absurd result.
However, that is generally used only in a true absurdity where the statute would cause extreme injustice or even a positively harmful result. In the examples you gave (2% corporate tax, 100 Justices, or a $55/hr minimum wage) the results would be undesirable but not absurd, and it is difficult to construe the law otherwise.
I personally have been the victim of three separate instances of some Congressman slipping a couple of sentences into a ginourmous bill on other must-pass topics. Which sentence is fully legal and effective, even if substantially zero of the Congresscritters were aware of it or its implications. I was also the victim a fourth time when one single sentence fell out of legislation unnoticed along the way.
I would not be being overly dramatic if I told you that each of these events triggered a 60 to 90 degree turn in the course of my life to great consequence. It’s of course unknowable whether net net I did better or worse from these course changes; life is like that.
But I can tell you it was enormously disruptive and expensive at the time and felt very unfair. Bolt from the blue is about how it seemed.
This is totally business as usual in both Washington and your local statehouse. I’ve just been unlucky enough to be standing right there when three / four of these things hit.