Oops, I did it again.
This. Is. Awesome. That
lawsuit Sen. Rand Paul filed against the NSA? The person who wrote it says that Rand Paul and Ken Cuccinelli plagiarized it, and he's
ticked.
Since December, the libertarian lawmaker, a tea party favorite, had been working with former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein to draft a class-action suit seeking to have the National Security Agency’s surveillance of telephone data declared unconstitutional; the two men appeared together as early as last June to denounce the NSA’s activities.
But when Paul filed his suit at the U.S. District Court in Washington on Wednesday morning, Fein’s name had been replaced with that of Ken Cuccinelli, the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia who until last month had been the state’s attorney general. [...]
Fein, who has not been paid for his legal work by Paul’s political action committee, was furious that he had been omitted from the filing he wrote.
Veeery ticked:
Ken Cuccinelli stole the suit,” [spokeswoman Mattie Fein] said, adding that Paul, who “already has one plagiarism issue, now has a lawyer who just takes another lawyer’s work product.”
Though a few changes were made, there's no question that the document was Fein's. The rest of the suit seems to have turned from theoretically bipartisan effort to Full Wingnut Version as well, dropping Democratic Sen. Mark Udall as co-plaintiff, adding astroturf group FreedomWorks to the plaintiff list and naming Obama himself as a new defendant. Yup, it's been Cuccinellified.
That's libertarianism for you. If you see something you like, swipe it and take the credit. The good news is that this looks to be the beginning of a bee-utiful enemyship:
When Mattie Fein responded in an e-mail to Cuccinelli calling him “dumb as a box of rocks,” Cuccinelli wrote another e-mail to Bruce Fein saying, “I think this relationship is untenable.”
Oh my. Pardon us while we just pull up a chair ... all right, perfect. Proceed!