<i>far from demonstrating the absurdity of the Supreme Court's position taken to a logical extreme (to paraphrase your characterization), it does no more than take a straw man position out to a logical extreme and therefore illustrates nothing</i><p>This is a much better explanation of the view point you expressed originally - probably the best I've seen so far. I agree with you here completely. I still think it's a clever hack, but I concede that my original argument wasn't very strong.