Will President McCain Enforce the Thirteenth Amendment?

There are a lot of reasons to worry about the sort of Supreme Court justices that John McCain will nominate if he's elected president. But slavery isn't one of them, no matter what Whoopi Goldberg has to say about it. On The View this morning, after listening to McCain make an unusually comatose case for judges "who strictly interpret the Constitution," Goldberg asked, "Should I be worried about being a slave? … Because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change."

McCain's response? "That's an excellent point." I don't know if excellent is the word I'd use. When conservatives complain about judges "legislating from the bench," they mean protecting rights that aren't explicitly listed in the Constitution, such as privacy (or liberty of contract or the right to educate your child in a private school). Unless McCain starts campaigning to pass a new amendment reinstating slavery, I think Whoopi can rest easy. Besides, if she had read Lysander Spooner or Frederick Douglass, she'd know that slavery was already illegal before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Watch the whole sorry thing here.