Dumb, Dumber and Dumberest

Move over Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels: there’s a new kid in town.

In an op-ed published over the weekend in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson ( R-Knucklehead) remarks that his ridiculous Obamacare lawsuit was dismissed on the legal technicality, (the legal technicality, he says),  of  ” standing “.  Johnson seems to think if he invokes the phrase legal technicality this will somehow reduce the legal concept of standing to something frivolous as opposed to, say,  his very genuinely frivolous lawsuit.

But who, the conservative reader may be asking him or herself, considers Johnson’s lawsuit frivolous beyond the Obama faithful?

Well, the National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy for one, who published a piece in the National Review last January aptly and unequivocally titled: Ron Johnson’s Frivolous Obamacare Lawsuit. Here’s McCarthy on the doctrine of  ” standing ” :

The political-question doctrine — like the related prohibition against issuing advisory opinions — relieves courts of the burden of intervening in legislative debates. When our system functions properly, public-policy questions are decided in the political process by elected officials who answer to the voters; the judicial power is reserved for real cases and controversies involving truly aggrieved people.

That limitation on court intervention is called the “standing” doctrine. It holds that there is no justiciable case unless the claimant has suffered a concrete injury resulting in quantifiable damages as the result of some alleged violation of the law.

You’ll notice McCarthy makes no mention of “standing” as a legal technicality. Johnson’s case was dismissed because a federal judge ruled Johnson did not prove he’d been harmed. It’s just that simple.

But clearly sound legal reasoning and just plain common sense find no purchase within the scrambled cranial mass of intellectually flaccid mush that inhabits the space wherein Ron Johnson’s brain ought to lie, and so he intends to file an appeal. Onward, Senator Dumberest, and travel well!

Maybe you can hitch a ride with these guys.

 

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