Imagine if you will. You are a bill. Just a poor little bill. And you’re just sitting there on Capitol Hill. And you want so badly to become a law! Well, if K Street has done its job and the talking points are mouthed with sufficient glibness by the pampered prisses who adorn the cable news channels and enough Fortune 500 companies have lined the boudoirs of our public servants with hard currency, then you, little bill, have a chance when the head count comes around. And baby, if you get through Congress with more yeas than nays then you are a law! Kicking down easy street from then on! Whooping it up, doing body shots with all the other laws at Eye Bar!

Or not. You see, newly minted law, there is still a hurdle you may have to face—the fierce contender that is judicial review. Checks and balances, natch. Everyone knows what that’s all about, right? This is the sort of thing this DCist needed to know to graduate from the eighth grade. That’s why it was a little surprising to hear Rick Santorum, grown man and elected public servant from the state of Pennsylvania, say the following after a federal judge decided that a “measure passed by Congress did not require” him to restore Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube:

“You have judicial tyranny here. Congress passed a law that said that you had to look at this case. He simply thumbed his nose at Congress … That’s nice for him to say that. But that’s not what Congress told him to do. Judges should obey the law. And this judge — in my mind — simply ignored the law.” (from 1115.org)