Jared wrote:
His gibberish about "federalizing a private crime" is what really raises the questions about who should be teaching a law school class.
From a law prof in the comments section:
Here's what Biden said:
"Women who are abused and beaten and beaten are women who are not able to be in the work force. And the Supreme Court said, 'Well, there is an impact on commerce, but this is federalizing a private crime and we're not going to allow it.' I think the Supreme Court was wrong about that decision."
You are mischaracterizing both Biden's statement and the Morrison decision when you say that the civil rights remedy in the VAWA only "federalized a tort" rather than "federalizing a crime" as Biden said.
Biden did not say that the VAWA created a federal criminal offense; he said that what the VAWA federalized was state crime. And that's absolutely correct. Indeed, Congress based the federal civil rights remedy in the VAWA on an explicit finding of gender disparity in the state-court enforcement of crimes of violence.
So the follow-up you fault Couric for not doing would have been mistaken: while it is true that VAWA created a federal tort, Biden was absolutely right in saying that what VAWA federalized (through a tort action) was state crime. Stated differently, the civil rights remedy in the VAWA took conduct that was criminal (and tortious) under state law and made it a federal tort.
First of all, the power of his gaffe on this point stems not from the fact that he remains proud of an attempt to shoehorn additional causes of action through the Commerce Clause, but rather the fact that the phrase "federalizing a private crime" is a legal non sequitor. This may be inside baseball, but that phrase is just off the wall in this particular discussion.
With respect to Muller's analysis, it's non-responsive to the extent that there is no such thing as a "private crime." As a result, he's criticizing Althouse on grounds totally unrelated to Biden's mistakes.
Couric really should have followed up on two different fronts to clear through this folderol. She should have asked, as Althouse contends, about what limits he sees on Congressional regulation via the Commerce Clause, and she should have asked him why women don't have adequate remedies in the State courts.
Jared wrote:And all these contortions of language and logic to deflect the fact that Palin, when asked, couldn't name a single Supreme Court decision that she disagreed with. But then again, being that she's the most experienced and qualified person in the whole field, I'm sure there's a good reason for her to have fumbled the question.
Given that Palin never collected a paycheck for law school lecturing, I think it's self-evident that she needn't be held to the same standard as Biden when it comes to Constitutional law. Moreover, nobody "deflected" anything with this discussion of Biden's obfuscations and gasbaggery, particularly because the author wrote, and I linked to, a completely separate dicussion of the Palin interview.
Jared, I saw the interview long before I read her analysis. And it struck me as bizarre and inaccurate for him to say that the right of privacy is a topic about which he disagrees with his conservative friends. It's not like he couldn't have picked from a panoply of legitimate areas of disagreement, but he went for the short political jab and scare tactic No. 2. (No. 1 being, incidentally, scare old people about Social Security).
Though Teal didn't need to take a pot shot.
