June 26, 2008 3:24PM # Stephen Colbert and the Supreme Court By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE In the interview [touted below](https://www.cato.org/2008/06/21/tv-is-great/) by Jim Harper, the faux-neocon character played by Stephen Colbert asks constitutional scholar Neal Katyal, “Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?” He’s ostensibly speaking for the four conservative justices who dissented in the [*Boumediene v. Bush* case](https://www.cato.org/2008/06/17/some-reactions-to-the-supreme-courts-ruling-about-habeas-corpus-and-guantanamo/). But today he could be channeling the four liberal justices who dissented in the [*D.C. v. Heller* case](https://www.cato.org/gunban). Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that he couldn’t imagine that the Constitution would “limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.” It is sadly hard to find justices who don’t, in some cases, sound like “Stephen Colbert”: > “Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?” For a discussion of how the Constitution does in fact establish a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, go [here](http://www.catostore.org/pdfs/Supreme%20Court%20Intro.pdf). ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).