When clever only
looks like dumb
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Presidential contempt for the Supreme Court and
inconvenient law is not new. But rarely has a
president sounded so, well, dumb, as when Barack
Obama lectured the justices on what they can and
can’t do to his cherished Obamacare.
The court would take an “unprecedented,
extraordinary step” if it overturns his health-care
scheme because it was enacted by “a strong majority
of a democratically elected Congress,” the president
declared. Obamacare actually cleared the House by
only seven votes, 219 to 212, and on their face the
president’s remarks betray an astonishing ignorance
of the Constitution and how the republic works.
But Barack Obama is neither dumb nor ignorant. The
man praised as the greatest orator since Demosthenes
celebrated hope and change in ancient Greece knows
better than to bandy words foolishly. So why would
he say something so foolish and dumb?
Even a community organizer knows that the authority
of the Supreme Court to determine whether acts of
Congress conflict with the Constitution is well and
truly established. The president, who frequently
describes himself (inaccurately) as a former
professor of constitutional law, sounded willfully
ignorant. The White House has been putting out
“clarifications” every day since, arguing that Mr.
Obama, once a “senior lecturer” at the University of
Chicago law school, didn’t actually say what he
actually did say.
Republican politicians, pundits, lawyers and
academics who leaped to lecture the president on the
finer points of the Constitution missed by a mile
the point of his rant. Mr. Obama’s rant was not
meant for Republican politicians, pundits, lawyers
and academics. He was talking to his congregation
and his choir, building a fire under them and giving
them an advance look at talking points for the
campaign to come if the Supremes kill or wound
Obamacare. He’s more than willing to sound dumb and
ignorant in the greater cause of his re-election.
He actually appropriated battle-tested language of
assaults on earlier Supreme Courts, berating
“judicial activism” of “an unelected group of
people” trying to “somehow overturn a duly
constituted and passed law.” The president had
clearly been reading about the campaign to “Impeach
Earl Warren” on billboards and bus-stop benches in
the wake of the desegregation rulings a generation
(and more) ago. These billboards flourished like
azaleas in April along highways and byways across
the South. No one actually expected to see the chief
justice dispatched in shame and ignominy, but the
vision of such a spectacle, cultivated by
segregationist politicians in Richmond and
Birmingham and Little Rock to keep hope alive,
propelled white voters to the ballot box to preserve
the politicians. Maybe this court’s conservative
majority could be demonized, too.
President Obama’s rant against the court was of a
piece with his earlier joining the Revs. Al Sharpton
and Jesse Jackson – and much of the mainstream media
– in race-baiting tragedy in the death of Trayvon
Martin. Instead of quietly assigning the Justice
Department to determine the facts and whether
Trayvon Martin’s civil rights in federal law were
violated, the president suggested the tragedy was
all about race when there is still no evidence that
it was about race at all. Race-baiting, ugly but
often effective, was once the exclusive province of
the right; it has become the default tactic of the
left.
Mr. Obama uses the tactic skillfully. He put his
remarks about the Trayvon Martin tragedy in the most
calculated and emotional terms – “if I had a son he
would look like Trayvon Martin” – and his lecture to
the Supreme Court was carefully calibrated, with
lawyerly ahs, umms and pauses suggesting that he had
given his remarks careful thought and was determined
to be precise and specific (like Demosthenes). The
later “clarifications” put out by the White House
retracted nothing.
Attorney Gen. Eric Holder delivered at the end of
Mr. Obama’s remarkable week the “three-page,
single-spaced letter” requested by a U.S. Appeals
Court judge in Houston, affirming that the Justice
Department agrees, even if the president appeared
not to, that “the power of the courts to review the
constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute.”
No surprise there, and we can be sure that the
president himself vetted the letter, if indeed he
did not write it himself.
One outraged pundit decides that Mr. Obama has
revealed himself to be “no longer a serious man. Nor
an honest one.” This misses the point, too. Barack
Obama never was.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.