So Representative Gephardt, in his Look at me! campaign for the Democrat nomination for president, briefly made his voice heard above the dim din of the other candidates by saying:
“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” Gephardt said.
Rachel Lucas was the first to go off on him, followed later by Professor Volokh, Andrew Sullivan, Professor Reynolds, and even ScrappleFace, leading to the normal blogomockratic firestorm.
Okay, so Il Dick would knock out at least one competing branch of government if he were elected president. I have good news, though, he won’t! He’s such a longshot candidate that he’s firing all of his guns at once and imploding in his space, or something along those lines.
Unlike Ms. Lucas, Prof. Volokh, Mr. Sullivan, Prof. Reynolds, and Mr. Face, I have had the privilege of voting against Dick Gephardt. When I lived in Attempted Casinoport, Missouri, that unincorporated area known colloquially as “Lemay,” I was in his district. Every two years, I got to vote for whatever Don QuiGOP candidate tilted at the Speaker of the House. The best protest votes I ever cast.
But I digress. When prompted to explain the statement by ABC’s The Note, Gephardt’s office said:
We asked the Gephardt campaign for a response.
“The fact that this question comes from libertarian law professors should speak for itself,” spokesman Erik Smith wrote in an e-mail. “Dick Gephardt knows the law. The president can not overturn a Supreme Court decision. That’s not what he said. He was simply expressing his commitment to diversity and his willingness to use the tools of his office to promote affirmative action programs to the fullest extent possible. It’s important to remember that Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the military.” [Emphasis mine]
So the response is that libertarians are whack jobs! Ad homenim! Of course, they’d hate to practice the politics of personal destruction, but since some people have begun taking the representative at his word, there will be hell to pay!
Fortunately, Dick Gephardt will return to citizen life soon, and by “citizen life” I mean “highly paid lobbyist life.”
