In a Washington Examiner column Tuesday, reviewing Texas governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s book, I wrote:
It’s clear from Fed Up! that the guy with a degree in animal science from Texas A&M understands the Constitution better than Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review.
I said that because Fed Up! is pretty radical for a campaign tract. At times it reads like a call to restore what legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen—borrowing from Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s 1995 Cato article—has dubbed “the Constitution in Exile”—which is to say, the original Constitution, whose doctrine of enumerated powers, Fed Up! notes, effectively vanished after the New Deal.
Alas, there isn’t a lot of room for nuance in a 600-word column; it might have been more accurate to say that Chip Roy, former senior adviser to Sen John Cornyn (R‑TX), understands the Constitution a lot better than Barack Obama does.
Roy’s apparently the guy who did most of the heavy lifting on the book. Perry singles him out in the acknowledgments for “special recognition”—Fed Up! “wouldn’t have been possible without Chip’s dedication over the course of several months.” Chip, Perry writes, “you have a brilliant legal mind, and after working with you on this project I will never again attempt one like this without you by my side.”
As these things go, Perry was relatively gracious and hardly tried to hide the fact that he’d had major help. Which is fine. I don’t know whether or not it’s fair to call Mr. Roy the “ghostwriter,” but being a governor is a busy job, and nobody really expects elected officials to write their own books these days.
Even so, when he’s called upon to explain the ideas in a book that he put his name on, Gov. Perry doesn’t exactly impress.
Here’s the transcript from a Newsweek interview the governor did last fall, when Fed Up! came out, and its arguments should have been fresh in his memory.