The Toadies Pick Up the Chant

President Obama has "walked back" his attack on the Supreme Court. No surprise there since Obama, a former professor of Constitutional Law, had based his attack on a lie. According to professor Obama, were the Supreme Court to overturn a law passed by a majority of Congress it would be unprecedented and improper. Obama well knows that this is nonsense. Since the start of the country, the Supreme Court has had as its principal function determining whether or not laws passed by majorities in Congress are constitutional. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of such laws have been struck down as unconstitutional. So it would not be unprecedented for it to happen with Obamacare; it would merely be the Court carrying out the role assigned to it in the American system of government.

Obama walked back the attack since he did not want to continue to look like a liar. After all, most Americans understand at some level that the Court determines whether or not laws are constitutional even if Congress passed those laws. Obama realized that he could not get away with continuing to lie on this point.

But even though Obama walked back his rhetoric, his toadies rushed in to pick it up. This morning Maureen Dowd, the dragon lady of the New York Times denounced the Supreme Court as "hacks in black robes". In essence, MoDo's attack is based upon the premise that the justices are political rather than judicial and that overturning Obamacare that was passed by a majority in Congress would be an inappropriate act. While MoDo spewed venom as she usually does, she clearly picked up the attack that Obama began and ran with it.

What is comical is that Dowd has no idea what she is talking about. She spends a great deal of time denouncing a decision announced earlier this week which approved the use of strip searches for all prisoners held in a jail even if their crimes were only misdemeanors. To Dowd, this is an outrageous imposition on personal liberty. (Why do liberals only care about liberty if the liberty is that of a criminal?) The court decision was that once someone is incarcerated, the need to preserve security in the prison outweighs certain freedoms that apply outside prison. Should the guards be subject to attack with weapons brought into prison but left undiscovered due to restrictions on personal searches? The court sanely said no to this.

I assume that Dowd is just the first and rudest of the Obama toadies to take up the charge. By the time the decision on Obamacare is released in June, I expect that the country will be used to hearing about "hacks in black robes" from many in the media. I doubt, however, that it will work. If Obamacare goes down, and the left certainly expects that it will, no one but the left itself will see this as a political act. The Constitution will be vindicated and no lies or phony outrage will change that.