Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is again demonstrating that for years he has managed to be a good p.r. person: there is no, way, shape or form that he deserves to be cast as a learned, thoughtful college professor in media reports. In fact, he continues to make assertions that must make many people of both parties and no party breathe a sigh of relief that his chances for the Republican nomination are nil. The latest: there is nothing in the constitution about the Supreme Court:
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made the surprising and completely false assertion this week that the Constitution doesn’t mention the Supreme Court.
“There is no Supreme Court in the American Constitution,” Gingrich told an audience in Pella, Iowa. “There’s the court which is the Supreme of the judicial branch, but it’s not supreme over the legislative and executive branch. We now have this entire national elite that wants us to believe that any five lawyers are a Constitutional convention. That is profoundly un-American and profoundly wrong.”
So now according to Mr. Gingrich decades centuries of junior high school and high school teachers, college professor, journalists, reporters, op-ed writers, broadcasters, all of America’s past Presidents (and, yes, that includes Ronald Reagan) and law professors were wrong. It has all been one big charade.
And all of those who believed the Supreme Court functioned as they were educated were…”unamerican.” Were they Communists? Socialists? Or what?
For this assertion we suggest Mr. Gingrich use this as his campaign theme:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.