I noticed similar things — Biden either doesn’t know or is happy to mislead the public about constitutional questions, and he adheres to a far-left judicial philosophy — when watching his response to Katie Couric’s questions about Roe and other Supreme Court cases he disagrees with.

On Roe, he was highly misleading. As Slate’s XX Factor blog has noted, his comment that a Supreme Court mandate is “as close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours” is simply ridiculous. In a nation with 50 states and countless localities that can all pass their own laws, why do we need a consensus? And how does forcing the entire nation to adopt the same law create one?

Also, he stated (accurately) that Roe divided pregnancy into three trimesters: The first is basically un-regulatable; the second can be regulated a bit; the third is pretty much open to restrictions. What he doesn’t bother to note is that on the very same day, the Court handed down Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton. This case basically said, “Never mind about the trimester stuff. All abortions are legal, at any stage of pregnancy.” It did so by finding a right to abortion to protect the “health” of the mother, which it allowed doctors to determine and defined to include pretty much any inconvenience: “The medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.”

Finally, Biden said he opposed the Supreme Court’s finding that parts of the Violence against Women Act (legislation he had spearheaded) were unconstitutional — accepting a very open view of what the “commerce clause” allows the federal government to regulate. Of course, he emphasized that the bill was about domestic violence, which will lead the uninformed to think that he stood up to a court that hates equal rights for women.

The real issue with this case is that, while those who abuse women deserve any punishment they get, nothing in the Constitution explicitly gives the federal government the right to mete out such punishment. That is a job for the states. The only way Congress (and Biden) can get around this is to claim that abuse “substantially affects interstate commerce.”

I guess it’s true enough that a woman who’s been abused will find it harder to participate in interstate commerce, but please. If we define “substantially affecting interstate commerce” to include anything that could in any way affect any small subset of the population’s ability to work, no domain of life would remain out of the federal government’s clutches. The Court’s current precedent of demanding that regulated activity be at least related to economic activity is more than reasonable.

If anything, it allows for more federal regulation than the Founders intended. It was the courts, not the Founders, that gave us the language “substantially affecting interstate commerce.” The Constitution gives the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce itself, not anything that affects it.