Pixie For President: Why Judge Posner's Cat Deserves Your Vote

If you'd rather elect a cat than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, then Pixie is the candidate for you!

Judge Posner's cat, Pixie.

Judge Posner’s cat, Pixie.

One of the more famous cats in American legal circles is Judge Richard Posner’s cat, Pixie. She is almost eight years old and quite perturbed by the sorry state of the Presidential election. Given how unpopular Trump and Clinton have turned out to be (Pixie wasn’t surprised by this, of course), and that the third-party candidate doesn’t seem to know any more about foreign affairs than does Pixie, she has decided, even at this late date, to run for the highest office in the land (which is fitting for an animal who always wants to sit at the highest point of the room). [/caption]

Judge Posner, of course, is not allowed under the ethical rules binding on all federal judges (except for eight who will go unnamed) to publicly declare his support for Pixie. Thus, we personally met with Pixie last week and she communicated her willingness to run, and asked us to make her declaration public.

Her platform is simple and straight forward:

1) Impose a hefty federal tax on all dog licenses;

2) Extend Medicare and Medicaid to cats;

3) Terminate the Migratory Bird Treaty we have with Canada; and

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4) Leave everyone else alone.

There are, of course, a few potential legal impediments to her candidacy but, after consulting one of our country’s leading experts on legal thought, who may or may not be supporting Pixie (but must remain unnamed), we have decided that Pixie is not constitutionally barred from running for the Presidency.

The Constitution says that no “person” may be President unless he or she is 35 years old. Pixie is not technically 35, but this chart found on the internet (which means it must be true) says that an 8-year-old cat is actually 48 human years old. There is no lawyer in the land who would not argue in a court of law that Pixie easily satisfies the age requirement (especially as there are renowned law professors who have argued that even humans who are not yet 35 could satisfy the 35-year-old requirement).

The requirement that Pixie must be a “person” presents a more difficult but not insurmountable barrier. The most convenient dictionary on hand defines “person” as “a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing.” And, we, and our unnamed legal expert, agree that it is likely that the founding fathers who wrote (and/or ratified) expected humanness to be a requirement for those running for President. But, and this but could swallow the Pacific Ocean, our most distinguished constitutional Originalists have been telling us for a while now that the question in constitutional law cases is emphatically not what the drafters or ratifiers expected the Constitution to mean but instead what legal principles they were putting forth. This is in great part how Judge Bork justified Brown v. Education, how Professor Will Baude can claim that Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas are originalist decisions, and how Randy Barnett believes constitutional law should be constructed by judges and citizens alike.

So, had the founding fathers, and the white, male property owners alive at the time of ratification, known that someday a sexist, crooked, completely unqualified orange-tinted monster would be running against a deeply unpopular, obviously mistrusted, and in many people’s eyes (though not ours) unethical candidate, they might have agreed that a smart feline would be much closer to embodying desirable human qualities and essential humanness than either of our two national candidates.

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Lest you think no Supreme Court would ever buy such an argument, we would remind you that (rhymes with cat) august body has interpreted the word “Congress” in the first amendment to mean “the President,” has interpreted the word “another” in the 11th Amendment to mean “the same,” and has literally (in the millennial sense) made up from whole cloth all kinds of constitutional tests with no basis in text or history such as the “endorsement” test for “Establishment Clause” cases and the “undue burden” test for cases arising out of a constitutional provision saying no state shall deny to any person “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” And of course, there is that whole right to privacy thing….

The truth about constitutional interpretation, as Segall has written in none other than the august Harvard Law Review, and as Judge Posner said publicly during a conference in Chicago last year, is that if the consequences are important enough, the justices do not care one cat pellet what the text of the Constitution says or what the ratifiers of that document expected to happen. To millions of Americans, there is nothing more important than making sure that neither Trump nor Clinton ever becomes President of the United States.

Thus, Pixie for President, and text and history, once again, into the litter box!


LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

Eric J. Segall is the Kathy and Lawrence Ashe Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, and is (mostly) to blame for this post.  Email him at esegall@gsu.edu.