So there’s this guy, Randy Barnett. He teaches at the Georgetown Law School. He is, in fact, the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown Law School. And he fancies himself a wit, but as the late Christopher Hitchens once put it in another context, he’s only half right.
The professor posted the following Xwitter witticism in the wake of the shooting Saturday night.
If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen.
Ho, ho, ho.
This was playing off something the former president—note to professor Barnett, he still gets to use the title, dude—said in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, which happened in February 2012. (Evidently, it took professor Barnett 14 years to think this one up.) President Obama mused that, if he had a son, the son might have ended up like Trayvon Martin, which sent the Obama crazies into orbit. Professor Barnett apparently never came down. He stayed up there, like Vanguard 1, still circling since 1958. And get used to professor Barnett. He’s the brains behind the administration’s attempt to prove that the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it clearly says. From Above the Law:
Lately, Randy Barnett has embraced a role as one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Trump administration’s effort to read the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment out of the Constitution. He co-authored The New York Times op-ed attempting to slap together the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding for Trump’s executive order to deny citizenship to children born here to non-citizen parents. But, despite fancying himself a Fourteenth Amendment expert (who wrote a 2021 book titled The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit), Barnett seems to have never previously considered the idea that the birthright citizenship clause and the 125 years of precedent that goes with it meant anything other than what it says.
Apparently, his years of scholarly attention to the Fourteenth Amendment totally whiffed on this point until Stephen Miller pointed it out. Originalism is, after all, a serious endeavor.
Patrick Hotung is certainly getting his endowment’s worth.
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