Chief Justice Roberts Fires Back at Pres. Obama

   The wires were abuzz this week with news of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' speech to the law school at the University of Alabama. Chief Justice Roberts broke his silence about Pres. Obama using his State of the Union address in February to lash out at the Supreme Court"s recent decision on campaign financing.


 
By a narrow margin the Court invalidated certain restrictions on campaign financing by corporations and labor unions. Pres. Obama lashed out at the decision in front of the justices who were forced to sit there, stone-faced, as the overwhelmingly Democrat chamber applauded loudly around them. It was a scene out of a North Korean re-education camp.

   Chief Justice Roberts today questioned whether the Court should continue attending the annual State of the Union affair, saying that the event had "degenerated into a political pep rally."

  Obama Minister of Propaganda, "Bagdad Bob" Gibbs, staunchly flaked for the president, saying in reply that the Court ruling opens the door for Big Corporations to buy elections. (In the liberal half of the world there's always a bogeyman, and the bogey is always Big.)

   But that's a red herring. Few if any corporations can or would do that because they have to answer to too many people. For example, they would risk loss of business by endorsing a conservative candidate and risk upsetting their more liberal customers. The same goes for financially supporting liberal candidates and causes. No company wants to risk a product boycott. And if sales do decline because of a company's political activism the company's management has to answer to shareholders who care about only one thing: their investment.

  Truth be told, the ruling, far from ushering in a new era of Robber Barons, as the president intimated, actually benefits Mr. Obama's biggest supporters: labor unions. Labor union spending on elections far exceeds that of corporate America, $80 million in the last presidential election. Labor bosses themselves strutted around after Pres. Obama's election and claimed that they were responsible for putting him in the White House, with millions of dollars in donations and thousands of get-out-the-vote foot soldiers. The Court's ruling only increases their ability to buy elections.

   In seeking to embarrass the Justices Pres. Obama said that they had "reversed a century-old law...that will open the flood gates for special interests." But the president, who bills himself as something of a constitutional scholar should have known that the turn-of-the-20th-century law he claimed the ruling invalidated wasn't the issue. It was a portion of the more recent McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act that the Court took to to the woodshed.

   Let's assume for a minute that the president confused the two laws, rather than engaged in deliberate demagoguery, railing against "special interests". The real issue is that he committed a transgression not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the Court to task 73 years ago for invalidating much of his New Deal program (It's a prickly thing, that Constitution.) In addition to socialist-leaning politics, Barack Obama shares what was FDR's boundless self-confidence that somehow his intellect gave him the right to act badly in public.

   The Supreme Court is the most respected institution in the U.S. At a time like this, when the president's job approval ratings continue to sink like a two-seam fastball, and Congress' job approval rating hovers down there with used car salesmen and televangelists, the Supreme Court remains nearly universally respected. Does the Court always get it right. No.  Both liberals and conservatives rail against specific decisions, and not all individual justices are held in the same regard. But the institution of the Court is respected by nearly everyone.

   That's because no matter who we are, where we come from, whether we're rich or poor, black or white, we all feel that the Supreme Court is the last stop on Democracy Road. It's the institution that will set things right when everything else seems so wrong. It is the one place we can go where we think we'll get a fair shake, no matter if our name is Linda Brown or Ernesto Miranda. Yaser Hamdi or George Bush. The one place that's never forgotten the Forgotten Man, because it doesn't forget the Constitution.

   Mr. Constitutional Scholar, Mr. Defender of the Forgotten Man, forgot. He forgot when insulted the Court on national TV.

   Mr. Obama's supporters use a lot of adjectives to describe him. Brilliant. Articulate, Cool. I'll add another based on his State of the Union performance.

   Graceless.

   Just thought you'd like to know.