OK, thanks; I feel better now. I couldn’t believe I could be that far off.
Nemo, I agree, that’s pretty funny. But then the strict States Rights folks I’ve come into contact with were not especially deep thinkers. They were more the reactionary type.
Obama screwed up his presidential oath. Enough that it was administered a second time in a private room somewhere a second time.
What was up with that?
No, Chief Justice Roberts screwed it up, because he decided to memorize it rather than read it. They did it a second time later just so nobody could make a silly argument about Obama not having done the oath correctly.
And it wasn’t in a private room; it was in the Map Room at the White House with staff and reporters present: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012103685.html
As to the perverse “states rights” interpretation giving the President a pardon power even as to state offenses, I don’t buy it, either. Every reference to the “United States” in the Constitution is clearly to the nation as a whole, not to the states individually. Certainly many people before the Civil War thought of the Union as a much looser polity, but no credible legal scholar that I know of has ever suggested that the President may pardon state offenses, and no President - and we’ve had some with very sweeping views of their powers - has ever asserted such a view.