Sigh - on the DMN Opinion blog" Obama must be governing under someone else's Constitution "

[w8liftinglady]

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/04/obama-must-be-g.html

can't imagine the Obama administration, if not the president himself, won't immediately launch some serious walking-back of his seriously misinformed remarks yesterday about the Supreme Court and his health care plan.

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.

He can be confident, and he can attempt to persuade or even intimidate the five or so justices not already in his pocket. You don't have to like this to understand what a president can or can't say.

But "unprecedented"? "Extraordinary"? Even the most devoted Obama fan can't stand by that.

It does make one wonder what Professor Obama was teaching his constitutional law students at the University of Chicago.

The president is entitled to his opinion that a 219-212 vote in the House, absent a single yea from a Republican, is a "strong majority." Or that Obamacare barely escaped the Senate with just enough votes to avoid a filibuster, again without a single GOP tally.

snip

But as much as we might not like it selectively, laws can be and have been subject to judicial review for roughly as long as this has been the United States. Believe it or not, dozens -- hundreds or thousands, even -- have been passed by majorities of duly elected legislatures and congresses and then overturned in full or in part.

For the former editor of the Harvard Law Review to now say that it would be "unprecedented" for a court to overturn a law is astonishing. My friend Rod Dreher, when he was with us here on your local editorial board, used to call such statements an "assertion without an argument."

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. I think ...

The writer of this piece is doing what conservatives do ... taking an out of context snippet of what was actually said; assigning it a contextual value, completely unrelated to the statements original context.

In this case, the "unprecedented" SCOTUS action that President Obama was speaking of was not the act of Judicial Review; but rather, using Judicial Review to overturn a democratically enacted law that is supported by 75+ years of precedent.