Obama Declares War on Supreme Court

Today, President Obama effectively declared war on the Supreme Court. Speaking from the Rose Garden, he suggested that the “unelected” Supreme Court must avoid the “extraordinary … unprecedented” measure of striking down his unconstitutional Obamacare regime:

Ultimately, 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 …

This is not the first time Obama has threatened the Supreme Court. Back in January 2010, in his State of the Union Address, he dramatically misrepresented the Supreme Court’s stance on campaign finance, and explained, “Last week, 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.” Justice Alito shook his head and mouthed, “Not true.” That’s because it wasn’t true – but Obama’s interpretation of Constitutional law is lacking at best, deeply dishonest at worst.

Obama is now tackling a strategy stated by Rep. Jim Clyburn this morning – he’s going after the Supreme Court as his bête noire, knowing they cannot respond. But he’s bound to fail for a simple reason: the American public understands that the law is unconstitutional. Obama is no FDR, and nobody is interested in packing the courts to raise their taxes and devastate the economic future of the country.

Unfortunately for Obama, he also made the tactical misstep of explaining why if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional, the entire law should be struck down:

I think the justices should understand, in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually have health care.

In other words, the individual mandate lies at the heart of Obamacare; without that beating heart, the rest of the law becomes unworkable.

In the end, Obama was left to argue that there is a “human element” to the law that would require the justices to rule in its favor. He’s calling on them to use his famed empathy standard in dealing with the constitutionality of laws. Unfortunately, it seems that at least five justices understand there’s no jurisdiction over empathy for the third branch.