Obama flunks constitutional law

For someone who once taught classes at a law school, President Obama doesn’t seem to know much about the powers of the Supreme Court.

At a press conference Monday, Mr. Obama said he did not think the high court would rule that forcing Americans to buy health insurance was unconstitutional. “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,” he said.

There’s plenty of precedent for voiding a law like Obamacare. The top justices have invalidated more than 150 federal laws in part or in whole. Nor would there be anything extraordinary about such a step, as courts frequently make these types of rulings. In fact, it would be unprecedented and extraordinary for it to let stand the unconstitutional aspects of Obamacare.

There’s also no truth to the suggestion that Obamacare passed by a “strong majority.” The vote was 219 to 212, a razor-thin margin in which 34 members of the president’s own party voted no. The margin of passage has never been a factor in the Supreme Court’s review of any law. That’s simply not a part of American jurisprudence. In fact, if Mr. Obama believes what he says, he ought to be very satisfied with the validity of the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed in 1996 by a whopping 275 margin in the House and by 71 votes in the Senate.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/barack-obama-constitutional-ignoramus.php

I’ve been growing weary of hearing people mention that he’s a “constitutional scholar,” since he never published a single thing on the subject either as editor of the Harvard Law Review or as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School. But hey—he taught constitutional law, didn’t he?

Not really.

His course on constitutional law, one of several constitutional law courses on the U of C curriculum, dealt exclusively with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment—the favorite, all-purpose clause for liberal jurists to use to right wrongs and make us more equal by judicial fiat. There is no evidence that Obama ever taught courses that considered other aspects of constitutionalism, such as executive power, the separation of powers, the Commerce Clause, or judicial review itself.

To try an illustrate what could possibly occur when uninformed, even if well intentioned, people start mucking around with the checks and balances that make up the Constitution, I refer you all (who are of a certain age) to the analogy of an old fashioned spring-wound alarm clock.

I can already see some people out there grinning...

Yup! It used to be pretty much a right of passage, especially among boys, but girls were known to succumb as well. Let’s gaze back fondly in memory...

There it sits on the parent’s bedside table. Every day it ticks, ticks, ticks, ticks.... In the morning it rings.... parents wind it up and it goes on ticking, tick, tick, tick...

We (those privileged to share the memory), remember looking puzzled at the outside, wondering how all that ticking business works. Then, noting the screws holding the back in place... go hunting for a screwdriver.

Of course, getting the back off was not much fun. All the details are still hidden behind parts and gizmos... Maybe if I take off this one...

Hmmm.... a little better... but what about this.... And then maybe SPRRRRROOOOOOIOOOOINNNNGGGGGGG!!!!!!

Of course you have to imagine all the various clock parts flying off into different directions of the bedroom, the chip in the top of the mirror, and we won’t go into the sore red backside that was experienced when Mom/Dad came home...

We weren’t bad (really). We didn’t intend to bust the clock. We were just curious. Or maybe we thought we could use the clock as an engine for a model airplane... it doesn’t matter.

What really matters is we had no real knowledge about the basic forces and tensions that were involved in keeping that clock running. We had no idea which screw was providing the checks, and which part was providing the balance.

I strongly feel that monkeying around with the checks and balances that make up our Constitutional form of government is much the same because nobody really knows where the most dangerous stress points are, or what will happen once the first one breaks loose. Any attempt to “fine tune” the Constitution is fraught with peril — which is exactly why the founders made the process as cumbersome as possible.

It’s worked for more than 236 years now. But if Obama keeps monkeying around with the works, it might not last another.

Interesting - I didn't know that was the subject of his course, but it's certainly not surprising.

This, by the way, is the type of "judicial activism" that Gingrich and other conservatives have been criticizing: the activism that led to the destruction of entire school systems by court-imposed busing, for example. That's judge-made law, and it does indeed represent judicial activism.

The power of Constitutional review is not judicial activism by any stretch of the imagination; they can get it wrong, of course, such as in the case of Roe v Wade, where the leftist ideology of the majority of the Justices encouraged them to "find" things in the Constitution that even they admitted were not there in order to support their ideological decision. And they have certainly erred in other decisions, almost all of which went on to cause festering socio-legal problems that were eventually rectified later.

But that's a far cry from the judge-made law, the true judicial activism, that Obama and the left were seeking under the shelter of the 14th Amendment.

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