ON PRESIDENTIAL CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION

Haven't thought about this a lot yet, but let me just applaud Dick Gephardt for being a good defender of presidential constitutional interpretation (even though Steven didn't mean to highlight that aspect of his comments). There's too much deference to the Court out there, and too few assertions of interpretive authority by the other branches of government. Instapundit's attempts to go after this one by comparing it to Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond's racist presidential bid are silly. Running on a segregationist platform is wrong. Presidential challenges of Supreme Court authority are in a different ballpark, and are defensible on many reasonable views of constitutional interpretative authority.

Seems to me that when Gephardt said that executive orders could be used to counter what he considers Supreme Court errors, perhaps he had something in mind like the continual wrangling over executive support for overseas organizations that provide abortion, something that I've never heard a lot of complaints about from those who like restrictions on abortion. I know that restrictions on oversees abortion providers don't directly counter Roe, but they certainly fall into the class of presidential actions described by Gephardt; just because folks critical of Gephardt can't think of a policy that would fit his comments with respect to affirmative action doesn't mean that there aren't any potential orders that he could plausibly defend as countering a hypothetical anti-affirmative action ruling. Politics is partly about finding creative solutions to policy problems, after all.

Jim Joyner would agree with me, although for slightly different reasons, I think.