Did Obama pass the Bar?
April 4, 2012 by Don Surber
http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/53723 President Obama’s little temper tantrum over the Supreme Court voting down his unconstitutional takeover of the health insurance industry may have awakened a sleeping giant — the Judiciary. Good lawyers know better than to tick off judges. And your common graduate of Cleveland State University knows the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the law. Apparently a Harvard education was wasted on the president because on Monday, the president said it was “unprecedented” for a “group of unelected people” to tell him no. Instead of studying John Marshall, Charles Evans Hughes and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Barack Obama must have been poring over George Wallace’s tirades against that “group of unelected people” in Washington.
Like I said, don’t tick off the judge.
President Obama did and U.S. Judge Jerry Edwin Smith, a 25-year veteran of the bench, gave the president a figurative dressing down.
From Fox News:
A federal appeals court is striking back after President Obama cautioned the Supreme Court against overturning the health care overhaul and warned that such an act would be “unprecedented.”
A three-judge panel for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to explain by Thursday whether the administration believes judges have the power to strike down a federal law.
Cut to the chase:
“Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?” Judge Jerry Smith asked at the hearing.
Justice Department attorney Dana Lydia Kaersvang answered “yes” to that question.
A source inside the courtroom, speaking to Fox News afterward, described the questioning by Smith as pointed.
Smith also made clear during that exchange that he was “referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect … that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed unelected judges to strike acts of Congress.”
“That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority,” Smith said. “And that’s not a small matter.”
The president’s animosity toward the Constitution is well-known among conservatives, who said this in a 2001 radio interview:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
What sort of 40-year-old American who is not a socialist blathers on about “negative liberties”? He wants unlimited government. That’s socialism. Judge Jerry Edwin Smith called him on that perverted view of constitutional government. Expect more of these confrontations, not less as Barack Obama has chosen anger, hate and spite as his re-election theme.
