In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this week, former pizza executive and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain took a surprisingly liberal view on gun control:

BLITIZER: Let’s talk about gun control. Do you support any gun control?

CAIN: I support the Second Amendment.

BLITZER: So you don’t? What’s the answer on gun control?

CAIN: The answer on gun control is I support, strongly support, the Second Amendment. I don’t support onerous legislation that’s going to restrict people’s rights in order to be able to protect themselves as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

BLITZER: Should states or local governments be allowed to the gun situation . . .

CAIN: Yes

BLITZER: So the answer is yes?

CAIN: Yes. The answer is yes, that should be a state’s decision.

Watch it:

Cain’s position — that Congress can’t regulate guns but states can — not only places him well to the left of the NRA, it also places him at odds with the Supreme Court. In McDonald v. Chicago, the justices held 5-4 that the Second Amendment applies equally to the states and to the federal government.  So any gun control law that Congress could not enact also cannot be enacted by state or local governments as Cain would prefer.

Cain’s relatively moderate stance on gun control also places him well to the left of the Republican Party. Senate Republicans savaged Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings because she took the Herman Cain position on gun control while she was a lower court judge — although Sotomayor’s decision was the correct one because it came down before the Supreme Court changed its interpretation of the Second Amendment in McDonald.

To be fair to Cain, however, it is much more likely that he simply doesn’t know anything about the Second Amendment than that he actually is staking out a somewhat liberal position on guns. In his first Sunday show interview, Cain exposed his utter ignorance of foreign policy by not understanding what the Palestinian “right of return” is. Cain launched his campaign with a speech that mixed up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He claimed that Congress is powerless to regulate bankruptcy, even though the Constitution says exactly the opposite. And he embraced a wildly unconstitutional plan to force Islamic federal employees to swear a loyalty oath.

In other words, Cain is clearly more interested in making the Constitution up as he goes along than in actually following it.

A drug user needs to possess 18 times as much powder cocaine to get the same sentence as a person caught with “cocaine base” under federal law — a provision commonly known as the crack/powder disparity because the most common form of base cocaine is crack. Yesterday, however, the Supreme Court held that the harsher sentences also apply to “coca paste” and “freebase” cocaine, which are chemically similar to crack.

As a matter of law, this was the correct decision. As Justice Sotomayor’s unanimous opinion explains, the words “cocaine base” mean cocaine in a certain chemical form, and crack, paste and freebase all fit within the meaning of these words. As a matter of policy, however, the crack/powder disparity is impossible to justify.

The disparity was created in 1986 to suppress widespread fear of a crack epidemic, but the practical effect of this and similar kinds of harsh drug sentences has been to fill state and federal prisons with non-violent offenders who pose little, if any, real threat to society. Indeed, many states are now looking for ways to stop filling their prisons with drug offenders in order to control costs and eliminate prison overcrowding; conditions in California had become so bad that the Supreme Court recently held that the state’s overcrowded prisons amount to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

Moreover, because African-American drug users tend are more likely to use crack, while white drug users tend to use powder cocaine, the practical effect of the disparity has been to fill the federal prison system with non-violent African-American offenders. Eighty to 90 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses are black, while 70 percent of powder cocaine offenders are white or Hispanic. As one federal judge once put it, the disparity “makes the war on drugs look like a ‘war on minorities.’ ”

As an added cruelty to the defendant in yesterday’s case, the crack/powder disparity used to be even harsher on crack offenders — a 100:1 ratio rather than the 18:1 ratio under current law. President Obama signed a law in 2010 which reduced future crack sentences, but it does not apply retroactively. As a result, thousands of small-time offenders are currently serving draconian sentences that Congress already decided are way too long.

Former Ambassador and perennial losing candidate Alan Keyes has long been the gold standard for right-wing extremism. Keyes sued President Obama in a birther lawsuit claiming the Obama was born in Kenya. He called the president a “radical communist” and a “usurper.” And he once called embryonic stem cell research the “moral equivalent of Nazi medical experiments on the inmates of death camps during World War II.” Yet, in a column published at the birther website World Net Daily, Keyes slams GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain for saying he would require Muslim federal employees to swear a loyalty oath:

Herman Cain is certainly aware that the First Amendment withholds from the U.S. government the power lawfully to prohibit the free exercise of religion. But has he thought at all about the connection between that provision and the one that says that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for “any office or public trust under the United States”? Mr. Cain apparently believes that in today’s world Americans have good reason to distrust any follower of Islam. But the Constitution explicitly prohibits officials of the U.S. government from applying religion as a criterion for public trust, whatever their individual inclinations. This means that whatever his personal predilections, as president of the United States Mr. Cain (and anyone else elected to that office) would be required to set aside his personal views. He could not as a matter of public policy take the position that an office or public trust under the U.S. government (including a seat on the Supreme Court) would be withheld from someone of the Muslim or any other religion until they dispelled to his satisfaction some prejudice (however justified it seems to him, to me or to anyone else) as to their loyalty.