Can Obama Conquer the Supreme Court

He campaigned against financial mismanagement, and the “harsh realities” of global capitalism. He pledged during his campaign to end corruption in both the government and the private sector.

After being elected President, he claimed that he had “inherited” the worst economic situation in recent history and then went about consolidating his power. Once privately-owned enterprises were “restructured” into government owned entities, some even organized into workers’ cooperatives.

Unemployment remained painfully high, even as the much-celebrated “reform” measures were being implemented. As private sector workers suffered with worsening economic conditions, government employees enjoyed the comforts of steady work and benefits while the President and other policy makers sought increasing control over the nation’s privately-owned wealth.

Does this seem like a description of the Obama Presidency? Certainly this depicts, at least in part, what we’ve experienced in the U.S. since the earliest days of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.

But - believe it or not - this is actually a description of the ascendency of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In fact, you could call this a “textbook case.” I’ve paraphrased a bit for the sake of column space, but this description of Chavez appears in “International Business: Competing In The Global Marketplace,” a text book currently used among M.B.A. students at many of America’s top graduate business schools.

Chavez became the democratically elected President of Venezuela in 1998, a decade before Barack Obama was elected to be our President. And the reason Chavez has been able to morph in to a dictator – he has successfully seized control over privately owned banks, tv stations, farms and gold holdings, to name a few items – and the reason he is still in power today, is because the first thing he did after taking office in 1999 was to substantively change his country’s constitution and re-arrange the nation’s judiciary.

The fact that one man could so quickly seize control of the entire country of Venezuela, probably speaks to some relative weaknesses in that nation’s constitution. And the fact that no U.S. President – not even Barack Obama – has seized this type of control over America, speaks to the relative strengths of both our U.S. Constitution itself, and the separation of powers among our three branches of government that are stipulated by our Constitution.

With so much of our individual liberty resting on the foundation of the U.S. Constitution – and yet with most of human history having been littered with not-so-benevolent dictators like Chavez – we should both expect that powerful leaders will want to overreach in to our lives, and be vigilant to call fowl when they do. Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans are shocked by President Barack Obama’s contemptuous remarks about the Supreme Court last week, as the court review his signature “healthcare reform” law. Worse still, it seems that very few Americans recognize the President’s behavior is problematic.

Of course, President Obama is not the first White House occupant to desire more power than the Constitution allows. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, angered when the Supreme Court overturned some of his “new deal” (read “big government”) programs that he believed were unquestionably necessary to save the country, famously began maligning the Justices of the Supreme Court, publicly labeling them the “9 Old Men.” And as a means of overcoming the “separation of powers” obstacle, he proposed to “reform” that old, antiquated Supreme Court system by adding up to six new justices – justices that he could select and appoint!

Of course, FDR didn’t get his way. The Congress rejected his court reform legislative proposal, and the American people took a dim view of Roosevelt trying to circumvent the Constitution.

But that was the America of 1937. Today, it’s not difficult to imagine that President Obama could curry the favor of millions of Americans, if he chose to campaign against the Justices who may vote to overturn his all-important “Obamacare” law.

Who would stand with Obama in this type of Constitution-bending effort? Start with the entire AFL-CIO. Then add the entire “occupy” movement, and the burgeoning “99% Spring” uprising, and the prevailing powers of the Democrat Party. Put them all together, and you’ve got a critical mass of Americans who neither care nor understand a wit about history, “limited government,” the U.S Constitution, or the Separation of Powers. They want “stuff” – “free” healthcare, education, or whatever – and they want raw power in Washington to deliver that stuff, and to do so by whatever means.

“9 old men.” That pejorative description wouldn’t apply with the makeup of today’s Supreme Court. But we should all prepare for President Obama to take direct aim at, say, 5 or 6 “old” white men – men who are too strictly adhering to an old Constitution that was written by old white men – should the Supreme Court dare to think differently about the President’s healthcare reform law. And the President’s party won’t dare to question this tactic. But who will?

It has happened many times in our hemisphere by tinhorn dictators, why not at least once in the 250 years of the United States?

Obama drips with Caesarism, which is reduced in American usage to a throwaway reference to Spengler, but Spengler meant a lot by it, and anyone who's read Roman history knows exactly what he is talking about. The elements of the Roman Revolution are identifiable already in ours, even if they aren't as stinkingly developed. A legislature, for instance, peopled by millionaires, and controlled by them and by corrupt-and-corrupting special interests with a vested interest in controlling outcomes in an ossified legislative process in which unconstitutional procedures (continuing resolutions, "reconciliation") are increasingly used. That, for one.

Obama brings the element of the adventurous, ambitious scofflaw, constantly inventing and directing new pressures against existing groups and institutions to work not his singular will, but a collective factional will, in this case the neo-Stalinists' who are working with Obama as his kitchen cabinet and executive reports.

(Lewis in your cited source, quoting Madison)

"Altho' the old idea of a compact between the Govt. & the people be justly exploded, the idea of a compact among those who are parties to a Govt. is a fundamental principle of free Govt.

Notice that in the "New Deal" and "Great Society", both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted precisely the idea of "a compact between the Govt. & the people" -- thereby promoting FDR and LBJ to the status of equals of the People, and counterparties to a "compact", rather than servants of the People.

There's a con man on every street corner, and in politics they mob you, all spraying your face and offering to squeegee it dry for you -- with their hands in your pocket, or on your wife's honor.

RobbyS, it is likely that there is much more significance to the requirement for natural born citizens than a concern for ‘foreign princes,” though your point is well taken. Titles were abolished, but the inheritance of allegiance is impossible to completely remove. Even immigrants and exiles from the USSR and Cuba have left a part of themselves to come here. In the eighteenth century we were all, at one time, subjects of the Crown. After we had won our independence on the battlefield there was no certain way to ascertain that a child of an alien didn't hold a secret allegiance to the nation of his parent. That is the reason for the structure of the ‘grandfather clause.” In 1787 citizen who had resided in America for fourteen years was here three years before the Declaration of Independence.

Hamilton fought nobly in the revolution, and was Washington's most important officer, Secretary of the Treasury, when Washington accepted the presidency. Hamilton was very familiar with the common-law upon which our republic was based, and shared his judgments with Washington in voluminous letters. In one such letter, from 1790, Hamilton commented: “But Vatel, perhaps the most accurate and approved of the writers on the laws of nations, preserves a mean between these different opinions.” Hamilton, unlike Obama, depended upon “nature's law and Law of Nations” to support most of his decisions. In that respect alone, Hamilton is the antithesis of Obama. Open disagreement comes with the territory. In a republic, different opinions are expected. The Constitution established the ground rules, a doctrine of constraints on government, the opposite of Obama. And Hamilton, in an early draft, required a ‘citizen’ president, made no objection to John Jay and Washington's further constraint, probably taken, as noted by founder John Marshall, directly from Vattel.

From what I've read about Hamilton, the abandonment of his possibly Jewish mother in St. Croix by the black sheep of a titled Scottish family, and the terrible treatment of slaves , and of most not from Britain's privileged classes generated little or no allegiance for the British Colony, again, recalling that most everyone in pre-revolutionary America was a British colonial. Obama, on the other hand, if we believe Bill Ayers' biography of Barrack, ideolized his absent father, whose allegiance was to some flavor of Islamic Marxism. Hamilton and Obama are on opposite ends of spectrum from freedom of the individual to a central oligarchy built around socialism. (I would appreciate a reference to a better biography than the Ron Chernow Volume, which seems preocupied with Hamiltion’s possible bisexual activities, and reads like a potential montion picture script, causing our family put it down about half way through. A briographer familiar with legal history would help.)

“Worse still, it seems that very few Americans recognize the President’s behaviour is problematic.”

Mr. Maher, on his TV show, said it best; something to the effect that it should be done in this country the way it’s done in China.

His attitude reflects the opinions and “feelings” of many in the electorate who think Mr. Obama loves and cares for them.

They’re willing to forego the Constitution in order for him to take care of them.

(President Obama in 2013, 55 percent to 45 percent.)