Cliche: "stud and joist alike"

[Chad Nilep]

Apologies for a somewhat off-topic question.

In a syndicated column by Tom Teepen which appeared in my local news paper this
morning (it may have appeared earlier in Cox Newspapers) is the following
paragraph:

"The signing statement has been stud and joist alike to the administration's
construction of an executive branch unaswerable to court or Congress."

I am interested not in the political implications of this statement, but by the
phrase "(be) stud and joist alike". It is instantly decipherable as something
like  "be essential; comprise totally," yet I had never come across it today. A
Google search for "stud and joist alike" yields zero results; "stud and joist"
yields 677, and each of the first twenty results appears to be a literal
reference to construction.

Has anyone come across this phrase before? I wonder if it is a US regionalism.
If not, I wonder if others responded as I did, understanding the intent of the
phrase and experiencing a slight fancy at the unfamiliar usage.

--
Chad D. Nilep                         Rien ne serait pire pour
Department of Linguistics             l'humanité que de progresser
University of Colorado, Boulder       vers une situation où l'on ne
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~nilep/      parlerait qu'une seule langue.
                                       -Jacques Chirac