Secular Café: For Barack Obama, Law Professor, the Time to Lecture Is Now

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For Barack Obama, Law Professor, the Time to Lecture Is Now Apr 5th 2012, 12:19 Quote: For Barack Obama, Law Professor, the Time to Lecture Is Now By Andrew Cohen Apr 4 2012, 12:00 PM ET 315 The president has been criticized for defending the health-care law while the Supreme Court is still in session. But perhaps, like Roosevelt 75 years ago, he should be even more vocal. Compare the words and deeds of two Democratic presidents, both in their first term, both navigating the ship of state through rough economic waters, both dealing squarely with two separate editions of a very conservative Supreme Court. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's struggle with the justices of his era is both legendary and instructive. He famously lost the battle over his ill-conceived court-packing plan. But he won the war over much of his landmark legislation when the Court's conservatives either retired (Justice Willis Van Devanter) or timely changed their minds (Justice Owen Roberts). President Barack Obama's struggles with the current Court are also well documented. In 2010, he famously criticized the Court's conservatives for their Citizens United ruling, a 5-4 decision along ideological lines which has had enormous (and, you could argue, dire) political consequences for the 2012 election. And now, after last week's oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, President Obama is confronting the very real possibility that his administration's signature piece of federal legislation, the new health-care law, in whole or in part, will be tossed aside by the same five justices. When President Obama on Monday (and again on Tuesday) offered his own legal analysis, when he accurately identified the hypocrisy the health-care law's defeat would reveal about "judicial activism," he raised for renewed public consideration the question of what a president should or should not say while a Court case is pending. The president's comments were immediately criticized. On the left, Andrew Rosenthal of The New York Times wrote that the president missed an opportunity to more directly defend the law. On the right, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) called the remarks a "beyond distasteful" attempt to intimidate the justices. Even the often rogue 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals somehow interjected itself into the fray. Everything a president says has a political component to it. And virtually everything that has been said about this particular law has come to be viewed through a political prism. To its detractors, the law is a full assault on freedom -- the freedom to refuse to be part of a national policy with which they don't agree. To its supporters, the law is now a political bellwether, signalling both a limit to progressive legislative action and the constitutional peril a Republican-controlled Congress and White House would bring. In this context, and especially compared with the past, what President Obama said was a virtual mash note to the justices. ROOSEVELT On May 27, 1935, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Schechter Poultry v. United States. The justices ruled unanimously that Section 3 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, another one of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, represented an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. Four days later, an angry and frustrated president called reporters in for a press conference. ... http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...is-now/255396/

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