George Rebane
Memo to file: The President again denigrated his base constituencies today when he lectured them on how SCOTUS must deal with Obamacare. The former Harvard constitutional law professor solemnly informed his supporters that it would be unprecedented and the worst form of judicial activism for SCOTUS to overturn Obamcare’s individual mandate. After all, this piece of legislation is one that had been passed by majorities in both houses of Congress, presuming that other such legislation becomes law without the support of Congressional majorities. Therefore overturning a law with such a compelling provenance would be epochally improper.
And with little risk of embarrassment, all this was delivered to his stalwart, yet butt stupid, supporters in the most serious terms in the Rose Garden as the Canadian prime minister and Mexican president looked on. More educated commentators were a little stunned when later asked to properly frame these remarks. But everyone seemed to agree that the statement was indeed directed correctly to the politically receptive and established aggregate capacities of those that have always characterized his base, in spite of the remarks being totally devoid of factual content.
[3apr12 update] Our leftwing commenters again do me the dubious honor of ascribing the views and interpretations of this post as somehow being the unique and solo ramblings of a lonely conservative out of touch with the world. A contrarian view is that these commenters may need to broaden their news sources.
This morning’s (3apr12) WSJ front page headline ‘Obama Warns Supreme Court’ features the story of the President’s 2apr12 Rose Garden remarks in a most reserved and polite way, sticking to the facts of what was said. The newspaper properly reserved its interpretation of the accuracy of “Mr Obama’s astonishing remarks” for the op/ed page where it recommended that “the President needs a remedial course in judicial review.”
It appears that only those ideologically cemented to the progressive viewpoint claim the President’s remarks to be a perfectly acceptable interpretation of the Constitution (and history), instead of a statement of gross error made either gratuitously (as posited here), or from a fundamental ignorance not befitting our chief executive.
[3apr12 update #2] It is now clear that the national Left, beginning with Obama and coming down to the comments on this humble blog, just does not get the magnitude of President Obama’s latest foible. Obama spent most of the day trying to ‘walk back’ what came out of his untethered mouth yesterday.
It turns out that Obama’s remarks were so outrageous about the tri-partite powers of our branches of government that Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit Court has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to write a defense of the President’s understanding and intentions that is at least three single spaced pages long explaining what the hell he meant.
Meanwhile, the President still doesn’t get it (I’m beginning to think that with this guy ignorance is trumping perfidy) as he continued to call for SCOTUS’ “deference” to a “duly elected Congress”. There is no such deference called for in the Constitution; each case is judged on its merits with respect to its constitutionality. And the precedence, unknown to the President, is that SCOTUS regularly has struck down unconstitutional legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President. In the last 20 years SCOTUS has averaged two strikedowns per year.
In spite of all this, the local left (see comments) continues their attempt to dilute and dissemble the discussion of the issue. Understandably they cannot reasonably counter the devastating effects that this Presidency has had on the nation, and its no-holds barred socialist goals for our future. And boys and girls, we haven’t even started talking about the federal budget that no Democratic chamber of Congress has passed in the last three plus years. (Oh, did I mention that Obama’s submitted budget was so obviously lame that it was dumped unanimously by the House 414-0.)
But please don’t misunderstand any of this. That Obama’s policies have been destructive and butt stupid for our republic do not in themselves guarantee that the man and his minions will go down in flames this November. No indeed, the myth of the rational voter rules.


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