Sounds like Obama’s itching for a showdown with the Roberts court if they decide to overturn the healthcare act, either in part or in whole. It’s about time he stood up to these SCOTUS clowns, the conservative majority of which has never seen a judicial overreach they didn’t like. In addition to that, I can’t think of one good reason why citizens shouldn’t be mobilizing to impeach Clarence Thomas and Tony Scalia:
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday issued a rare, direct challenge to the Supreme Court to uphold his historic health care overhaul, weighing in with a vigorous political appeal for judicial restraint. He warned that overturning the law would hurt millions of Americans and amount to overreach by the “unelected” court.
Obama predicted that a majority of justices would uphold the law when the ruling is announced in June. But the president, himself a former law professor, seemed intent on swaying uncertain views in the meantime, both in the court of public opinion and in the minds of the justices about not overstepping the high court’s bounds.
“Ultimately, 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,” Obama said at a Rose Garden news conference.
The majority he referenced was not quite that strong; Congress approved the law two years ago in hard-fought party-line votes after a divisive national debate. Republican presidential contenders say they will make sure it is repealed if the Supreme Court doesn’t throw it out first.
For a president to weigh in so forcefully about a case currently under deliberation by the Supreme Court is unusual, and it speaks to the stakes at hand.
The law is the signature domestic achievement of Obama’s term and already a prominent source of debate in the presidential campaign. The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike down part or all of the law, including its centerpiece requirement that nearly all Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty.
Obama essentially sought to reset the public view of the case to where the White House thought the baseline lay before the attention-grabbing court arguments and the commentary that followed — that striking down the law would be a surprising reach for the court, and that the heart of the law is likely to be upheld.
Beating up on the Supreme Court, now that’s taking a political risk. Everybody, Left, Right, and center, already hates the Supreme Court. Obama might show a little more moxie by threatening to have the Congress cut off all funding for the staffs of each Justice. We are “broke” after all.
Is it feasible to impeach a Supreme Court Justice? Justice is supposed to be ‘blind’, that is, free of politics.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_a_US_Supreme_Court_justice_be_impeached_and_removed_from_office
Fergawdssake. The Supreme Court is supposed to be unelected. That’s the whole constitutional point. The idea is to balance the elected branches of government. You know. Checks and balances and all that good stuff?
I have to say, I agree with bmaz at emptywheel. Attacking the legitimacy of the Court over maybe not handing over 30 million captive customers to a private industry is fairly dumb.
Now that Obama is for it (after he was against it), the Left seems to have forgotten that individual mandates to buy government services from private companies is a right wing idea. See: privatizing the military, the prisons, education, Social Security, etc. And when it’s accomplished, the “service” becomes nothing but a useless profit center.
As Charles Pierce said,
I’m not saying they should be impeached over the ACA decision. I’m saying they should be impeached over the multiple conflicts of interest displayed by the conservative bloc with those having cases before the court, especially Clarence Thomas, whose wife is a paid activist working against the ACA. If the Supreme Court was under the same judicial code of ethics those on the rest of the federal bench have to follow, this wouldn’t even be a question. I’m not defending the individual mandate at all.
I think Obama sees his re-election chances improved by a political decision from the Court against the ACA. He clearly has put Roberts and Kennedy in the spotlight in a manner worthy of Newt’s promises to blackmail the Justices and makes the upholding of the law into capitulation. Professor of Law Obama did this on purpose.
Just to clarify, I’m not exasperated with your post, Susie — it’s an excellent post — I’m fed up with Mr. “Constitutional Law Professor” Obama who knows perfectly well that he’s demagoguing with the best (worst?) of them.
As for the conflicts of interest, sometimes it seems that that’s what the “con” in “conservatives” stands for. Although I do have a problem with automatically including spousal activities as conflicts. Given realities, that would mainly affect women, and would tend to limit them to flower-arranging. On the other hand, in Thomas’s case, it obviously is a real and massive conflict. It’s a mess.