President Obama made a decidedly strange remark today at a Rose Garden press conference when he was asked about the Supreme Court's review of 'Obamacare', i.e., The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010:
The president spoke at length about the case at a joint press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. The president, adopting what he described as the language of conservatives who fret about judicial activism, questioned how an "unelected group of people" could overturn a law approved by Congress.That was strange on several grounds. First, the Supreme Court has been overturning laws as unconstitutional since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. It's the exercise of judicial review pursuit to Article III of the Constitution. If Obamacare is overturned, will it be "unprecedented" and extraordinary? No, not hardly.
"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," Obama said.
Second, Supreme Court justices are "unelected" because that's the way the Constitution works. Separation of powers, and all that. They are appointed for life, as President Obama knows perfectly well.
Third, all the laws that have even been overturned were "approved by Congress." That's how they got to be laws in the first place. So what of it?
Lastly, as for the "strong majority" that passed Obamacare, it consisted of a 60-39 vote of the Senate with all Democrats and two Independents voting for and all Republicans voting against, and a 219-212 vote of the House of Representatives with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against the bill. If that was a strong majority, what would a razor-thin one look like?
What happened to the cool, laid-back, No Drama Obama of years past?
0 comments:
Post a Comment