Patterico proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Judge Whittemore and the Eleventh Circuit fell down on their job on the Terri Schiavo case.

The tendency of liberals to scream “assault on the judiciary” anytime any nonliberal criticizes a questionable court ruling favored by liberals is old hat, enough so that when I first saw this dreadful piece by University of Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein, I mostly ignored it. Then John Rosenberg pointed out this gem:

In recent years, some conservative politicians have been insisting that federal judges should strike down affirmative action programs, protect commercial advertising, invalidate environmental regulations, allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism, use the Constitution to produce tort reform, invalidate gun control regulation, invalidate campaign finance laws and much more — regardless of whether they can find solid justification for these steps in our founding document.

Nope, nothing in the Constitution about racial discrimination, freedom of speech, federalism, takings, separation of powers (except, of course, when used to insulate the all-knowing courts from the “political” branches), limits on excessive fines or awards, or certainly any “right” of any “people” to keep or bear “arms.” Nothing in there at all, not a thingy-dingy. I was tempted to blog about that, but I procrastinated, and Powerline beat me to the punch. The one additional irony I will point out is that among all of the allegedly non-constitutional rights listed above, the only one that was really a stretch, tort reform, is grounded in the U.S. Supreme Court case of BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, ___ U.S. ___ (1996), which was written by the most liberal member of the Supreme Court (Justice Stevens), with two other liberals (Souter and Breyer, J.J.) and both moderates (O’Connor and Kennedy, J.J.) joining, and all three conservatives (Rehnquist, C.J., Scalia and Thomas, J.J.) dissenting.

Now, Patterico alerts us to an even stupider line in Sunstein’s article, if that’s even possible. Immediately prior to informing his readers of the nonexistence of Amendments 1, 2, 5, 8, 10 and 14, he non-explains how “clear” it is that an act of Congress didn’t mean what any of the Congressmen who voted for (or even against) it less than a month ago thought it meant:

The problem, as the legal battle over Terri Schiavo demonstrated, is that whatever their politics, judges are unlikely to ignore the law. In that case, the law clearly did not authorize federal judges to order Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted — but some Republicans are outraged that the judges did not have it reinserted anyway.

Sunstein refers, of course, to Section 10 of the act, which provides:

Notwithstanding Section 2 of this Act, which requires the district court to review de novo any claim of a violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo within the scope of this Act, nothing contained in this Act shall be construed to authorize the court to do a fucking thing about it.

OK, I guess the professor’s got us there.

Not only is our non-liberal media not liberal, they’re even hip to conservative humor. Check out this photo, which is accompanied by a caption reading “Protesters blast Coulter at the G.O.P. Convention in New York City last year.”

Via Michelle and the Freepers.

UPDATE: They’ve finally corrected the caption. I wonder who tipped them off to the fact that Criminals For Gun Control aren’t really criminals, and don’t really support gun control?