Okay, this is definitely “old news” at this point, but I got to thinking about the fact that President Obama re-took the oath of office after switching some of the words around at his inauguration. The report linked concludes with this quote from White House counsel Greg Craig:

We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself . . . [a]nd out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time.

Because Democratic liberalism tends to eschew inconvenient constitutional boundaries (such as the actual words of the Constitution), it seems almost ironic that President Obama would be so concerned about the precise order of the words in the Constitution that he would re-take the oath the next day, just to make sure he got it right. Nonetheless, I think this will probably be one of the president’s only homages to textual originalism. The ever-increasing talk of vacancies on the Supreme Court have me concerned that four years from now, the Court will contain one or two more constitutional mavericks.

Today the California Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the contitutionality of the controversial Proposition 8 that was passed in November, amending the California constitution to prohibit homosexual marriage. Based on the things I have read and heard, it seems that many people are having a hard time understanding that the actual issue before the court is not the merits of such an amendment, but whether an amendment of this kind can be made by a simple majority vote. In other words, the California Supreme Court will not (I should say “should not”) be deciding whether or not homosexual marriage is a good thing, but whether the state constitution allows such amendments to be made the way Proposition 8 was. In short, this is a civil procedure case. Read the rest of this entry »