Cyberluddite: BritneysSpeculum: But see Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1997) (holding for the purposes of the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883 that a tomato was a vegetable based not on its botanical attributes but its common role in the American diet of the time)

I'm disturbed that you could recall off the top of your head that such a case exists, let alone that you could come up with a citation for it.

It's very much the textbook case of the law getting farking odd sometimes that's used in every freshman civics class ever to explain the shiat the judicial branch has to put up with sometimes. I admit I wasn't able to think of the year off the top of my head, though, had to use the google.

And, regarding the article: the writer's just a prick, and not an insightful or entertaining one. You can have basic respect for your opponents' character and attempts to follow what they see to be the correct course of action even if you disagree that it is, in fact, the correct course of action. Going to the funeral of someone who was essentially a good man and making petty political statements would have been not only infantile, but overtly disrespectful toward the idea of morality itself. Just because senators are morally degraded backstabbers for a living doesn't mean they're all that way in their private lives, too.