Gravel/Edwards '08!

HughHewitt.com is always better when it stows the Romneyganda and attacks the rest of the 2008 field. Here's an e-mail they got from the John Edwards campaign.

This is it— with 10 days left in the second quarter, we're about two-thirds of the way towards our goal of raising $9 million—double what we raised at this time in the 2004 race.

So from the start of April to now, Edwards has raised $6 million. From January through March, he raised $14 million. If FEC reports made a sound, this would be the sound of a kitten being tossed into a bag after the bag is tossed into a pond and the pond set on fire thanks to decades of environmental neglect and oil pollution. Don't pollute, everybody.

Also, Rick Perlstein chases down Mike Gravel, asks him about his idea to make the Iraq War illegal, and finds his Constitutional expertise… lacking.

I chased Gravel down as he was leaving, shoulder to shoulder with Ralph Nader. It gave me no pleasure to ask him, "Senator, isn't what you just described a 'bill of attainder'?"

I wasn't quite sure I quite got his attention (or perhaps, horrifyingly, he wasn't familiar with the phrase), so I elaborated. "Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution specifies that you can't pass a law to punish things that weren't against the law when the newly invented 'crime' was committed."

(I didn't add that this was the wisest stopgap to tyranny the framers of the Constitution devised—imagine, just imagine, if George W. Bush could suddenly have directed Trent Lott and Tom Delay to invent some ex post facto crime with which to incarcerate some inconvenient political enemy?)

Here's the exchange that ensued:

"Are you a Constitutional expert?"

"No, I'm a journalist."

"Well, Congress can do any goddamned thing that it wants."

This is untrue, of course: The presidency can do any goddamned thing that it wants. Separation of powers, people.