It’s a time-honored tradition at CNS: Send its summer interns out to pester members of Congress with the resume-padding busywork of a quasi-loaded question. And, thus, CNS’ interns spent late June hounding congressfolk with the highly scripted, pro-Trump-biased question: “Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution says the president ‘shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Do you think that the president has a constitutional duty to enforce the immigration laws on the books?”
CNS got a whopping 14 articles out of this schtick by our count, one for each congressperson they cornered on the question:
- Mike Crapo
- Ben Cardin
- Lamar Alexander
- Kevin Cramer
- Rick Scott
- Joni Ernst
- Susan Collins
- Al Green
- James Lankford
- Mike Braun
- Louie Gohmert
- Jim Risch
- John Kennedy
- Richard Blumenthal
There’s little actual news value here. Part of the point of this exercise is get the intern some resume material in the form of being able to say they asked a member of Congress a question. That can be helpful — look at where it got former intern Sam Dorman. But it’s a gotcha exercise too; any congressperson who fails to give the conservatively correct answer will be pilloried at CNS, with the hope of blowing up the incident into the larger conservative media (and the intern can get partial credit for that too).
It also, however, reinforces the idea that CNS is less and less about reporting the news and more and more about crafting right-wing propaganda.