President takes aim at Supreme Court - again

When it comes to the justice system, President Obama is a repeat offender.

No, he didn’t get in trouble with the law; he just doesn’t respect it — at least, he doesn’t respect the Supreme Court.

You all remember the State of the Union address in 2010 when the president upbraided the court for their famous Citizens United ruling that overturned a campaign-finance law as unconstitutional. Most members of the court were in attendance at the time, and took personal offense at the president choosing to mock their professionalism, wisdom and legal knowledge at a time and place where they were duty bound not to respond.

“Last week,” the president said at the time, “the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”

This was a classic attack in the Saul Alinsky mode. By applying pressure to the court in a setting where they were defenseless, President Obama was using his own strengths and the court’s weaknesses to his political advantage. As community organizer Alinsky famously said to his radical followers, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Imagine how the Supreme Court’s members felt as they sat stoically in the U.S. Capitol surrounded by members of Congress standing and applauding loudly as the president didn’t just state his personal opinion about campaign finance reform, but undermined the court’s credibility by stating that they were outright “wrong” in their decision. As a matter of legal fact, the court’s decisions can be neither right or wrong, but only the opinion of a majority of the justices. Whatever the outcome of those decisions, it behooves the president especially and the rest of us down the line also to respect the court and the process regardless of our personal opinions.

The president was widely criticized for his scolding tactic in 2010, but also widely praised by his fellow liberals. Apparently, it was the praise he heard, and not the cautions, because last week he did the same thing in an even more dangerous way.

In this case, he didn’t just complain about the court’s decision afterwards — he actively tried to lobby the court to uphold the health-care reform law known colloquially as Obamacare even while its deliberations are under way.

“Ultimately,” he said, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

As many others have pointed out, this is both wrong on the facts and wrong in its intention. It is hardly unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn a law “passed by a strong majority of a democratically Congress.” Indeed, the precedent dates to 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in “Marbury v. Madison” that the court had the power to declare a law unconstitutional, and did just that. This power of judicial review is paramount in our republican form of government and ensures that we are ruled by a Constitution, not by dictators. If a “strong majority” in Congress could ignore the Constitution whenever they felt like it, then we would live in tyranny not liberty.

You would think that a former professor of constitutional law like President Obama would know all this, and I presume he does, which is why I categorize it not as ignorance but as an effort to “keep the pressure on” the Supreme Court, following Alinsky’s Rule No. 8 in his “Rules for Radicals.”

We won’t even get into the fact that the “strong majority” was the bare minimum number of senators who could have passed the bill (58 Democrats and two left-leaning independents) and just 219 Democrats in the House compared to 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans (212 total) who voted against the bill. If you want to talk about a “strong majority,” how about the 245-189 House vote in favor of repealing Obamacare that took place on Jan. 20, 2011.

Again, let’s just take it as a matter of faith that a “strong majority” in Congress does not get to do whatever it wants, but only what the Constitution allows it to do. That’s called checks and balances, and it is a vital component of the tripartite form of government that our Founding Fathers gave us.

It is the sanctity of the three branches which President Obama has challenged — and which could do great harm if his challenge were somehow actually to intimidate the justices of the high court into doing his bidding.

There is very little reason to expect that to happen, of course, but it is certainly worrisome. Nor is this the first occasion when the president has arrogated to himself the powers which the Constitution grants to a different branch, nor has he only tried to intimidate or minimize the judiciary. In a remarkable instance last year, President Obama ordered the Justice Department to no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages and ensured the right of individual states not to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

By ordering the attorney general not to defend that law, the president has in effect vetoed it unconstitutionally. It is the president’s job to faithfully execute the Constitution and the laws of the land, and plainly it is up to Congress to pass laws, and the judiciary to review them. It is the president’s job to enforce them, not to write them and not to judge them.

Taking the three incidents together — the president’s rebuke in the State of the Union address, his intimidation of the court last week, and his failure to enforce a law because of his personal opinion — it is apparent that there is a pattern of politicization and strong-arm tactics coming from the White House that should worry anyone who wants the president to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

Although the president did come to the White House from Chicago, he does not have to govern as though he were still there.