Constitution 090.

There seems to be a little confusion – to be charitable about it – about precisely why the Republican party insisted on reading the Constitution out at the beginning of the 112th Congress. It’s not actually that complicated, really. It was because of idiots like this from the 111th Congress:

That’s Phil Hare from Illinois. If you can’t see the video: this fellow was so clueless about the US Constitution that he couldn’t tell where it ended and the Declaration of Independence began.  Which is embarrassing enough, but as Glenn Reynolds noted in passing elsewhere there were a lot of idiots in Congress who were demonstrating a similar lack of elementary understanding of the actually rather straightforward document that they were operating under.  And it wasn’t just legislators: the Volokh Conspiracy discovered this gem by Dana Milbank where Milbank quite relentlessly demonstrated that he knows less about the history of the suffrage movement than the people he’s sneering at. Continue reading Constitution 090.