jillian
Princess
The RNC shoots itself in the mouth
By Tom Goldstein on Mar 29, 2012 at 8:01 pm
Opponents of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama Administration really could not have had a better week. They did a tremendous job framing their constitutional argument against the statute to the public, the lawyers on their side were brilliant, and it appears that they had a receptive Supreme Court majority. It was an 11 on a scale of 10.
Now this. The RNC released an advertisement (embedded in the story linked below) with audio from the halting beginning to Don Verrillis oral argument on the individual mandate to make the point that (as the ads title says) ObamaCare: Its a tough sell. So far as I can tell, it is less a real ad that would actually run than a stunt intended to draw attention no less a stunt than the DNC surely has done in lots of other contexts.
But Bloomberg News had the good sense to actually compare the actual argument audio with what the RNC distributed. It turns out to have been materially doctored. As the Bloomberg piece says, A review of a transcript and recordings of those moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a much briefer period, and completed his thought, rather than stuttering and trailing off as heard in the doctored version.
Ive been in practice for seventeen years, and the blog has existed for ten, and this is the single most classless and misleading thing Ive ever seen related to the Court. It is as if the RNC decided to take an incredibly serious and successful argument that has the chance to produce a pathbreaking legal victory for a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, drag it through the mud, and vomit on it. I would be shocked if a serious conservative lawyer would stand by the ad.
SCOTUSblog