Obama’s sickening audacity

At the very moment when President Obama was making the unprecedented and extraordinary claim that it would be an unprecedented and extraordinary step for the Supreme Court to overturn a law passed by Congress, his own Justice Department (as former federal judge Michael McConnell informs us in the below column) was engaged in the unprecedented and extraordinary act of requesting the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress, namely the Defense of Marriage Act. Normally it is the executive department’s duty to defend the laws of the United States from court challenges. Obama’s administration is seeking to have the Supreme Court overturn a major law. Yet even as he is doing that, he is telling the Court that if it overturns a law he likes, it would be doing something wrong and unprecedented.

The Democrats are a party of leftist liars. But no one in U.S. politics has ever lied the way Obama does, or expressed through such lies the contempt both for truth and for America that he expresses. It is a spectacle that sickens the mind. An enemy alien occupies the White House.

Here is McConnell’s article:

O’s ugly ‘warning’
By MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL
New York Post
April 4, 2012

By all accounts, President Obama’s lawyers did a poor job of defending the constitutionality of his signature health-care-reform law in the Supreme Court last week. So he’s rearguing the case himself. On Monday, he declared that it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the court to overturn a law “passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

This statement is puzzling, to say the least. It is by no means “unprecedented” or “extraordinary” for the court to strike down the act of a democratically elected legislature.

Has the president not heard of Roe v. Wade (1973), where the court invalidated the democratically enacted laws of all 50 states? And even Marbury v. Madison (1803), which struck down a section of the First Judiciary Act?

How about INS v. Chadha (1983), where the court invalidated over 200 statutory provisions, many enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities?

Is the president unaware that the court in recent years has declared unconstitutional the Line Item Veto Act (struck down in 1998), major portions of the Sentencing Reform Act (2005), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1997) and two different attempts at campaign-finance law (in 1976 and 2010)—just to name some of the most prominent?

In two recent cases, US v. Lopez (1995) and US v. Morrison (2000), the court invalidated congressional statutes purportedly passed under authority of the Commerce Clause, on the ground that the statutes were not truly a regulation of interstate commerce—essentially the same rationale involved in the health-care case. Both those decisions were controversial, both were decided by narrow 5-4 majorities and both can be distinguished from the current case. But they surely count as “precedents.”

And both statutes were passed by stronger majorities than the Affordable Care Act.

No one agrees with the results of all of the court’s constitutional cases, and some of us think the court should show greater deference toward the elected representatives of the people. But the exercise of judicial review is at the heart of our system of constitutionalism.

The high court’s power to invalidate statutes passed by a democratically elected Congress is not a nefarious conservative creation. Many in President Obama’s party called for the court to invalidate President George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, which passed the Senate 98-1. Obama’s own Justice Department is asking the court to invalidate the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed the Senate 85-12 and was signed by his Democratic predecessor, President Bill Clinton.

The courts properly pay little or no attention to whether a challenged law passed by a “strong majority” or a slim one, because this is irrelevant to any legal issue.

But, in the interest of getting the facts straight, the president might have noted that his health-care law barely squeaked through the Congress, on a largely party-line vote. By contrast, many of the statutes the court has struck down passed Congress by lopsided bipartisan majorities.

What is “unprecedented” is for the president of the United States to make political speeches about cases under consideration by the Supreme Court. The New York Times called his statements a “barbed warning” to the justices that he’ll make their decision a campaign issue if they decide the case the wrong way. That steps over a certain line.

The president’s lawyers did their professional best to defend the legality of the health-care law, in the proper place at the proper time. Now it is the Supreme Court’s duty to decide the case on the basis of their independent legal judgment, without fear or promise of political consequences.

Whatever he thinks will be their decision, President Obama in his official capacity should show respect for the independent role of the court under our Constitution—just as he rightly expects the court to show proper respect for the office of the presidency.

No one knows how the court will rule here. It is the justices’ job to decide the case based on their own independent legal judgment. It is not the president’s place to attempt to influence their decision, after argument, in political forums.

Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appellate judge, now teaches constitutional law at Stanford Law School; he is director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and a Hoover Institution senior fellow.

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Laura G. writes:

Obama’s audacity is indeed sickening, and his lies and deceptions are the direct result of his entitled awareness that he is invulnerable and has no need whatsoever to adhere to the truth or reality. There is a simple reason that he can and does act in this unprecedented and egregious manner. That reason is that he has been given a complete pass by the entire nation regarding every aspect of his basic identity and background. Early in his political career he discovered that he could get away with refusing to release any of his life’s documents, and having succeeded in suppressing the timid inquiries about such a basic issue, he now knows correctly that there is nothing whatsoever that anyone will challenge him over. He hid and was assisted in refusing to reveal his birth certificates and then released an internet file that was immediately and widely identified to be a photoshopped fraud. There was no response from anyone or any organization. His selective service records have been shown persuasively to have been manipulated, and again there has been no response whatsoever. All of his presumed school records are adamantly hidden. He appears to have been in the leadership of the Harvard Law Review, and there do not seem to have been any publications that he authored, but again there is no inquiry about that peculiarity. His passport records, his social security numbers, his mother’s passport records, his birth records, his mother’s obstetric records, all surprisingly missing and as is completely usual there is silence from the mainstream media, denial of attention from all court systems at all levels, and silence from all political candidates and all political organizations. He has succeeded in being a person whose identity and background is a complete unknown to the entire nation.

As any parent can tell you in a heartbeat, if you allow a child to indulge in aggressive, lying, wrongful behavior, always only assuring him that he is wonderful and adorable, the child’s behavior will solidify into monstrous and probably criminal proportions. All we need to do is look in the mirror if we want to know how the current inhabitant of the White House learned to dare to behave as he consistently does. His entitled actions come as no surprise whatsoever to those who have been demanding that he release to forensic evaluators all of his basic documentation. Those efforts have been met with mockery and silence, and the entire nation is now experiencing the direct result. There are no surprises here.

April 6

Jeff W. writes:

If we accept that leftism, from a practical standpoint, is a project to put together an electoral majority in order to plunder the minority, then we can see that skills in deception will be highly valued in a leftist leader. In order to convince a majority to vote for him, he must tell convincing lies, because not all those who vote for him will actually receive shares of the plunder. In order to defuse opposition, the leader must also convince those who are about to be plundered that they are not in danger, that he is really their friend.

Theft and lies go together. Thieves always have to tell lies in order to avoid detection. The left’s stealing thus always takes place amidst a gaseous fog of lies.

It is clear to me that Obama thinks he can cobble a majority together from blacks, Hispanics, other recent immigrants, government employees, and other government dependents, ideological leftists, and women. The women’s vote is very important to him, which is why we are having to listen to a constant stream of lies about the Republicans’ “war on women.”

LA replies:

I would qualify the last point and make it “single women.” Most married women vote Republican. It’s the single women who view the government as their husband and provider.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 05, 2012 09:35 AM | Send