Freedom

Some of the senators — not most, but some — will be interested to know what she thinks of the Constitution as the Founders wrote it. President Obama will want her to rule on the law as decent and high-minded folk like him think it ought to be, not what it is. The gay community, which rarely seems very gay, expects her to be a reliable vote for changing the definition of marriage and for remaking the military into something Barney Frank can be proud of. Since Mzz Kagan has argued that the Supreme Court's role is mainly to tend the interests of "the despised and disadvantaged," somebody will be disappointed.

President Obama has a larger view of how his crusade should remake America. He's replacing a liberal with a "progressive" — the ultimate distinction without a difference — but Mzz Kagan's role will be to reshape Anthony Kennedy, who, like the amiable cow in the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, is "blown about by all the winds that pass." He could nevertheless be transformed with a successful convictions transplant by Dr. Kagan into a reliable fifth vote.

That's because the contending parties have devised a squalid little game of "you scratch my itch and I'll scratch where you itch." But granting the right to congressional representation for the District is a granting authority the Congress does not have, if words have meanings. The Constitution was deliberately written so that the common man could understand it without the mumbo-jumbo that lawyers invented to manipulate the law.

Article 1, Section 2: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." Congress, this makes plain and clear, is a legislative body made up of representatives of States, not of States and Districts (or townships and precincts). The capitalization of certain words, which seems so quaint to students of our present day, was hardly coincidental.

Ordinarily, this sort of boiler-plate civics-lesson blah-blah is easily dismissed as a politician's instinctive blather, but this is community-activism writ large, reflecting what Barack Obama actually believes and wants to impose on the court if he means what he says.

The voices of ordinary citizens are important, and it's important to make sure their voices aren't "drowned out" by "powerful interests," but once upon a time that was not the job of judges. The job description for a Supreme Court justice was about allegiance and dedication to the Constitution, which would take care of the citizens, ordinary and otherwise. A justice of the Supreme Court understood that he was to look to the law and leave community organizing to someone like Barack Obama.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican who once was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has channeled several of the Founding Fathers and learned that they want Congress to organize a tournament to determine the national collegiate football championship. Mr. Hatch is pretty sure the champs will be the Utes of the University of Utah, or ought to be. No word yet which school gets the president's vote, but he picked the Colts against the Saints. He should stick to basketball.

Once upon a time, both the president and the senator would have been hooted out of the game. That was when presidents and senators had their favorites, but looking after the country's interests did not include scheduling football games.

Nobody much calls city desks any longer — desk men, like everyone else, hide behind voice mail — and now it's Google that usually tells the curious minds who want to know that Miss Roman's first husband was Mortimer Hall, that Pittsburgh defeated Washington 21 to 0 in the 1937 Rose Bowl and the last of three actors who played Curley was Joe Besser.

But Google is important for other things, too, as China learned when the popular search engine told Beijing that it would no longer participate as a censor and would if need be leave the Middle Kingdom altogether. No more lies by omission.

When Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. awarded the Islamic radicals the opportunity to take their rhetorical carnival of murder and mayhem to New York City for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 assault on America, Mr. Holder insisted that he was only acting in the American judicial tradition of due process. A military tribunal is OK for a GI in Afghanistan but not for a criminal the GI captures there. His prescription is actually more in the tradition of "Rules for Radicals," the manual of civic disorder and troublemaking written by Saul Alinsky, Mr. Obama's revered mentor in all the things not in the province of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers. The president and the attorney general have had interesting instructors.

Neither the president nor the attorney general were quite prepared for the overwhelming, bipartisan, transracial outrage over their remarkable doctrine of "due process." Mr. Obama, questioned by reporters in Asia, insisted that the noose was ready for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (or KSM in the helpful shorthand applied to unpronounceable names). The legal niceties were necessary, but the wait for the hangman — or the needler, or electrician or whomever — would make the anticipation all the merrier.

Barack Obama's Justice Department said it would encourage U.S. attorneys to look the other way when they see hollow-eyed potheads emerging from the legal pot shops dispensing the noxious weed to "medical smokers."

In theory the decision won't necessarily increase the use of pot, either for medicinal or recreational purpose, and the president might be throwing a toke to his followers on the left already high on wingnut politics. He might even pass this off as part of his health care reform, a Senate version of which arrived Monday at 1,502 pages. This could be reckoned as pot in lieu of public option.

The hearings on her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court ended Thursday, and the mash notes served up to her by gaga Democratic senators when it was time for everybody to go home summed up just about all that everybody learned from the week's work.

Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island appeared to speak for all the Democrats on the committee, telling her that just watching and listening to her evasive answers to cream-puff questions "gives me goose bumps." Goose bumps are catching. Chris Matthews, who may have the loosest mouth among the cable-TV guys, first spoke for the Democrats when he said that when President Obama speaks he feels something crawling up his leg. (In fairness to the president, Mr. Obama was nowhere near Chris when Chris said that, and besides, the president always keeps his hands in his pockets.)