INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Will Obama Intimidate Roberts, Supreme Court On ObamaCare? He’s certainly trying.
We’ve seen this movie before — reruns of President Obama’s rhetorical efforts to vilify the court whenever it threatens to disagree with him, as it did in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the decision in 2010 that precluded the government from regulating political expenditures by nonprofit corporations.
Less than a week after the Citizens decision came down, with the justices sitting directly in front of him in the House of Representatives chamber, Obama addressed the nation in a State of the Union address and scolded the court for its decision.
He charged, inaccurately, that the decision would allow American elections to be “bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities.”
This transparent effort to intimidate the court, and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, was repeated in the days leading up to the court’s 2012 decision on the constitutionality of ObamaCare’s individual mandate.
On April 2, 2012, before the court issued its ruling, Obama seemed to warn the court, saying he hoped that it would not take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Unprecedented? In 1935, the same court threw out as unconstitutional both the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act, two main pillars of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 anti-depression recovery program, saying that they impermissibly expanded presidential power.
Obama added that if the court were to overturn the mandate, and thus ObamaCare, it would be an unambiguous act of judicial activism: “An unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”
When the court upheld ObamaCare by a 5-4 vote with Roberts siding with the four liberal justices, some thought that he, seeing himself as responsible for the court’s legacy, had been affected by the administration’s threatening rhetoric and wanted to keep the court out of the political cross-hairs during the fall election.
And some — see pretty much any Internet comment section — thought it meant the NSA had dirt on Roberts. So much for boosting the Court’s position.