Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Did Silly Goose Obama Just Cook ObamaCare's Goose?”

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April 3, 2012

Did Silly Goose Obama Just Cook ObamaCare's Goose?

Hatched by Dafydd

Nearly every court watcher agrees that ObamaCare hangs by a thread... the thread of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The four "conservative" (i.e., judicially modest) justices -- Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts -- appear poised to find the individual insurance mandate unconstitutional, and possibly the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 -- depending on how they rule on "severability," whether any part of ObamaCare can stand if the core of it is gutted.

And it's a dead cert that all four "liberal" (i.e., radical leftist) justices -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan -- will uphold the law, regardless of its constitutionality or lack thereof; for they rule according to politics, and it's very, very bad politics for the Left if they strike down the "crown jewel" of Barack H. "Occupier" Obama's administration. (Occupy la Casa Blanca's motto is "Everything inside the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.")

That leaves the swingin' justice, Anthony Kennedy, holding the sack.

So along comes the Occupier with this pronunciamento:

"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," President Obama said Monday of the High Court’s consideration of his signature health care legislation....

"I would just remind conservative commentators that for years what we have heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step," he said.

Translation: I won the dang election, and now I get to decide -- me, not a gaggle of errand boys for grocery clerks -- what's constitutional and what's not. So shut the frack up... or else!

Now this sort of taut, rage-fueled hectoring may play very well within the authoritarian Left; but how will it play in the broader electorate? None too well, I expect. Few ordinary people like to be lectured by a corrupt, abject failure. And more to the immediate point, how will it play to the majesty and dignity of the Court, especially to Justice Kennedy?

If Obama even thought about it for a moment before speaking, he might imagine that Kennedy will be intimidated, will fret that the press might beat him up again; and thus he will respond by slinking away with his tail between his judicial legs.

But I think the president, in this case as in so many other instances, is living in a lefty bubble. I believe he has seriously misjudged the consequences of yet another example of presidential defiance bordering on outright threat. Rather than frighten Kennedy into kow-towing to the man in the high castle, I suspect that Kennedy -- however he might have been wavering about striking down the entirety of ObamaCare -- will now dig in his heels and go the whole nine hogs. I think he's going to call Obama's bluff and go all "Citizens United" on 'im.

By his ham-fisted tantrum, I believe that Barack Obama has thrown the ObamaCare goose into a cooked hat. I believe that come June, the Occupier in Chief will desperately wish for a Wayback Machine to unsay his words from yesterday.

Yet another epic fail.

P.S. For a riotously funny order issued by the 5th Circus -- well, riotous as such court orders go -- check the second update to the mononymous Karl's typically wonderful post on Patterico's Pantaloons. It's a gas, gas, gas!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 3, 2012, at the time of 8:20 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Karl

If this were Clinton instead of Obama, I'd suspect he was trying to find a way to undo Obamacare, get himself and his party out from under an unpopular law, hand the problem over to the Republicans until the election, and start over with a clean(er) slate in his second term.

But I'm not sure he's as devious as the Clintons were.

The above hissed in response by: Karl at April 3, 2012 8:42 PM

The following hissed in response by: GW

Every judge and every lawyer - and indeed, every second year law student who has taken con law - was, I can assure you, staring wide eyed at the screen when Obama said that laws passed by Congress are ipso facto Constitutional and that, to hold otherwise would be judicial activism. I am sure the lefties just cringed and kept very very quiet. The measure of the angst it has caused with all others comes from the 5th Circuit's pretty unusual order, that amounts to being kept after school and forced to write 50 times "I will not lie about the Court's right to do Constitutional review of laws passed by Congress."

As to Anthony Kennedy - and indeed, every SCT Justice, even the liberal ones - well, biting the hand that is about to feed you is rarely a good idea. They all have to be seething. I would not be surprised if the mandate gets struck down between 7-2 to 9-0. As to the rest, I would say 5-4 the whole law gets tossed.

The above hissed in response by: GW at April 3, 2012 10:12 PM

The following hissed in response by: wtanksleyjr

GW, the trick with the term "judicial activism" is that the left has redefined it to mean "a judge who does something" (as though "activism" were nothing more than the opposite of "passivism"). That's fine for them, but then they constantly -- as Obama did in his quote -- pretend that we mean their invented meaning.

No, we don't mind judges striking down laws on constitutional grounds. Our problem is judges making law.

The above hissed in response by: wtanksleyjr at April 5, 2012 9:59 PM

The following hissed in response by: West

You see, when you lead from behind, you burn your bridges in front of you.

"Such idiocy smacks of genius, a lesser mind would be incapable of it".

The above hissed in response by: West at April 9, 2012 3:58 PM