Ramesh Ponnuru reveals today over at National Review Online that Justice John Paul Stevens got suckered in the recent Hamdan decision.

In deciding how to read the amendment, Justice Stevens, writing for the Court, looked at senators’ statements, among other things. Here he encountered a problem: The senators disagreed. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl, the Republican authors of the amendment, thought that it applied to pending cases. Other senators, notably Democrat Carl Levin, did not.

Stevens handles the problem in footnote 10. The statements by Kyl and Graham, he writes, “appear to have been inserted into the Congressional Record after the Senate debate. . . . All statements made during the debate itself support Senator Levin’s understanding” (emphasis in original).

But Stevens has it wrong. None of the statements he cites — on either side of the issue — was made during floor debate in the Senate. All of them were submitted for the record after the debate (but before the vote on the act). Compare the cited passages of the Congressional Record to the CSPAN videotape of the floor debate, and it is clear that Levin’s statement and the other statements supporting his position were inserted after the fact, just as Kyl and Graham’s statements were.

Oops.

Let me make a few points:

First, had Stevens known that all of the "debate" that he was quoting on the issue was not actual debate, it wouldn't have changed his decision one iota. Stevens wasn't using the Congressional debate to interpret what Congress meant, he was just picking and choosing "evidence" to support his preconceived decision.

Second, it makes this post and the debate over at Professor Bainbridge's blog take on a very different cast when everything was inserted into the Congressional record after the debate.

Third, the briefs that Justice Stevens depended on to characterize the Kyl-Graham colloquy vs. the Levin statement were obviously inaccurate and very possibly purposefully deceitful. Is there any recourse against lawyers who lie to the Supreme Court?