The President says he supports strict interpretation of the Constitution and then demonstrates that he can not quote it and does not know its history.

"Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges years ago said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That's a personal opinion; that's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America."

The president is evidently unaware that the 14th amendment was added to the constitution after the Dred Scott decision. This is really disgraceful. He tried and failed to quote 5 anacronistic words "equal protection of the laws" from the 14th amendment.

Guess this helps us understand why he has no problems with the patriot act.

I can't believe he's even worse than I thought.


update: I added the 5 words. Now I wonder if I was unfair to the President. Maybe he has a consistent view after all. He actually corrected himself "The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America." The only grammatically correct referent for "it" is the constitution (not plural human judges). So he seems to have said "[The constitution] doesn't speak to the equality of America." Now That would explain a lot. Perhaps he realised that he had been unfair to justice Taney and did not persist in his view that the 14th amendment was ratified before 1857.

On the other hand, even given this desperate effort to be more than fair, he isn't totally up on the constitution, since he used the present tense. This would only make sense if he thinks that the constitution *still* doesn't "speak to the equality of America", perhaps because he considers the ratification of the 14th amendment (and persumably the 13th and the 15th amendments as well) to have been achieved with improper coercion of the ex Confederate states. A logically consistent position. I wonder if anyone will attempt to find out if this is what he thinks before the voters decide if he is qualified to nominate supreme court justices.