President Obama's Challenge to the Supreme Court

This past week commentators have been talking about President Obama’s challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court. They were speculating on why he would make such patently false statements about the function and role of the High Court, particularly since he taught Constitutional Law at Harvard. The question seemed to be,

“Is he really that ignorant of the role of the Supreme Court, or was he just trying to isolate them as a target for his re-election campaign?”

I believe the answer is neither.

You see, his remarks were totally consistent with his liberal and progressive view of a “Living Constitution.” This was revealed when he spoke of the social consequences that would make striking down the law unacceptable. In other words, in his mind the highest authority was not the original intent of the authors of the Constitution but rather the presumed outcomes to meet the needs of society.

That was the established goal; the Constitution would have to conform to meet those needs, so the Supreme Court would have to rule in favor of the law and the interpretation of the Constitution would just have to conform. You see, President Obama’s idea of Constitutional Law subscribes to the ideology of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes who said in a speech in 1907,

“we are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is...”

That is the ideology of a tyrant, one who sees himself to be intellectually superior to our founding fathers, and by virtue of his “evolved” intelligence he truly believes he knows better than those who have gone before.

No, President Obama didn’t “mis-speak.” He knew exactly what he was saying, and to him it made perfectly good sense. Given another four years to “rule,” and we may lose the last of those stable Constitutional principles that have preserved us a nation.