Noted.

LAW A-BIDEN: Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, are supposedly very different pieces of the Democratic puzzle. Obama is the newcomer to Washington, the change agent. Biden is the senior "man of Washington," the old hand who can make change a reality. But Obama and Biden have one thing in common: they've both done stints as constitutional law professors. Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School--along with brilliant former jurist and liberal Congressman Abner Mikva--while Biden has for many years taught at Widener Law School in Delaware. This unique pairing intrigues New York Congressman Jerry Nadler. "Wouldn't that be a change?" mused Nadler, who chairs the Constitution subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "After eight years of trashing the Constitution, we might have an administration that actually respects the document."

Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin, a House Judiciary Committee member, hopes that "if we are not able to hold the current Administration to account, then when this Administration hands over its responsibilities and authorities to a President Obama and to a Vice President Biden, they will responsibly choose not to exercise some of the powers that we would argue were overreaches by this Administration. I would hope, also, that they would choose to help us to renounce the activities--torture and rendition, spying on American citizens without a warrant, outing CIA agents, whatever it is--that have been identified as abuses. Given their grounding in constitutional law, they should be inclined to do that." So maybe when a new President and Vice President swear oaths to defend the Constitution, they might actually mean it? "Exactly," says Baldwin.   JOHN NICHOLS

DENVER DIGEST: It's midway into the DNC and many journalists, it appears, are here hunting PUMAs ("Party Unity My Ass"), the die-hard supporters of Hillary Clinton who increasingly seem more like a figment of Chris Matthews's imagination than a species of Democrat. The Nation's convention team, however, left the chase to talk to less sensationalized delegates from across America. Christopher Hayes attended the inaugural meeting of the Muslim Democratic Caucus, headlined by Minnesota's Keith Ellison and Indiana's Andre Carson, the first and second Muslims, respectively, to serve in Congress. Hayes spoke with Aftab Siddiqui of Texas, who identified 9/11 as the Muslim community's "moment of need," during which the Republican Party "wanted to have nothing to do with us." As a result, says Siddiqui, "it's very hard to find Muslims who say they are Republican now." While such a meeting might provide fodder for Islamophobes on the right, Hayes concludes that the event follows in the long tradition of American ethnic groups like the Irish, Jews and African-Americans, who have "organized themselves and sought to achieve a measure of political power as a means of mitigating the challenges they faced."

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