re: #27 HappyWarrior

Yeah he never was a Senator or anything like that. And he apparently had enough regard for the Constitution that the University of Chicago let him lecture on Constitutional Law. Conservatives just can’t stand the fact that Obama knows more about the Constitution than they ever will so they make some cracks about how Obama is some moron who doesn’t know the Constitution.

In fairness, there are competing theories of constitutional law. It is an area of law (both practical and in theory) that draws a lot of attention and can lead to people having very different views on it. As an example - my former constitutional law professor, John Eastman, is incredibly conservative (he’s chairman of NOM and clerked for Thomas); his good friend, Erwin Chemerinski is dean of UCI Law School and as far to the left as Eastman is to the right (Chemerinski also wrote/edited what was one of the most used Con Law case books in law school while I was there). The two of them used to have a weekly spot on Hewitt’s radio show where they’d discuss Supreme Court cases and such.

The biggest difference between strict constructionists and living document supporters (and realistically there’s probably two or three more schools of thought, but those are the most prominent), is that strict constructionists tend to be more theoretical in their application while living document types tend to be more practical by trying to apply contemporary standards to old (and often vague) language.

That said, you don’t get to be editor of the Harvard Law Review and a professor (adjunct or otherwise) of constitutional law at the University of Chicago (two of the top four law schools in the country) without knowing something of constitutional law. So the idea that the president doesn’t know anything about constitutional law is stupid on its face.