Once upon a time President Obama limited himself to attacking the Supreme Court for its past decisions as when he used a State of the Union address to browbeat the Court’s justices sitting mere inches in front of him over their decision to overturn a federal ban on independent political expenditures in the Citizens United campaign financing case. The indignity inflicted on both the Court and the presidency by publicly castigating — falsely as it happens — the nation’s highest-ranking jurists with no opportunity for rebuttal as Democrats surrounding the justices leapt to their feet in a standing ovation should be nothing less than chilling to those who cherish the American system of government.
But with the oral arguments in the Obamacare case now history President Obama has taken his Chicago-style intimidation tactics up a notch attacking the Court before it issues an opinion as it goes about deliberating the fate of his signature legislation and with it perhaps that of his ability to keep using Air Force One and all those other nifty gadgets after 2012. “Ultimately ” he said at a press conference the other week “I am 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[.]”
To which Robert Alt replied in National Review: “Really? A strong majority? …. Or a majority-so-paper-thin-that-Democrats-had-to-ram-the-bill-through-without-even-reading-it-on-a-party-line-vote-using-gimmicks-because-it-was-so-wildly-unpopular-that-it-led-Massachusetts-to-elect-a-Republican-Senator-who-campaigned-on-voting-against-the-bill. Yeah I’m sure that’s what he meant.”
Obama wasn’t yet done: “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This howler was too much even for the Washington Post’s liberal court-watcher Ruth Marcus who admitted that
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