July 10, 2006

Republican Senators Try to Mislead the Supreme Court

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Wow. Let’s see if we’ve got this story straight. Senators Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) apparently inserted a fake dialogue into the Congressional Record in order to mislead a Supreme Court on the legislative intent of a law they passed. Emily Bazelon reported on the full story here. It’s a bit complex, but Christy Hardin Smith notes that what Graham and Kyl did essentially amounts to “knowingly filing false information with a court[, which is] grounds for disbarment in my state.”

It also seems quite weird that members of Congress are allowed to insert things into the Congressional Record that weren’t even said on the floor of Congress—or edit remarks after the fact. Seeing as how the courts often use the Record to try to gauge legislative intent, and seeing as how an unscrupulous Senator could easily altar that history without anyone else even noticing, this seems like something that should be stopped, no?

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