You Have To Wonder

I'm becoming convinced that conservatives see the Constitution as, at best, an irrelevancy. I can't think of any other way to explain this incoherent post by Ramesh Ponnuru:

Those excerpts from Couric's interviews give me more concerns about Biden than Palin. He seems to be under the impression that there's a "liberty clause" in the Fourteenth Amendment (he has talked about it in Supreme Court confirmation hearings too).

Publius corrects the record:

Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution:

[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[.]

And yes, courts do in fact refer to it as the "liberty clause" too.

And Publius gives examples.

And then he refers us to Ed Kilgore, who provides a nice deconstruction of Ponnuru's entire post.

Both Kilgore and publius aver that they have respect for Ponnuru's intelligence and capabilities. That's more than I can say, I'm afraid -- I've not found his arguments on various issues in the least compelling, even when he does seem to know what he's talking about. But then, I don't read him regularly, so maybe I'm missing something. Maybe.