What If Sarah Palin Had Said it?

Yesterday, I wrote about the ridiculous "analysis" from E.J. Dionne of president Obama's attack on the Supreme Court. Today another similar "analysis" from the left appears in Jonathan Cohn's Piece in The New Republic. Simply put, Cohn's piece is a scream. Here is perhaps the best part:

As for the accuracy of Obama’s claim, the critics have a point, albeit a small one: The president got a few facts wrong with the first of his two statements. Obama said a decision invalidating a duly passed law would be “unprecedented,” when, in fact, the Court has invalidated duly passed laws, from both Congress and state legislatures, throughout its history. This particular group of justices did it less than two years ago, via the infamous Citizens United decision striking down parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

That"s right! Obama completely mischaracterized the history and power of the Supreme Court, but that is just a "small" point; Obama just got "a few facts wrong". Ha! The president who came into office as the "smartest" possible man could not even correctly tell the country what the Supreme Court can and cannot do. Obama, the former teacher of Constitutional Law, got wrong the central fact of how constitutionality is determine in America. Those are not a few facts. They are not small points. They are lies. There is no other word for this; what Obama said was a pack of lies designed to help him politically at the expense of the truth. No rational observer could believe that Obama, the former president of the Harvard Law Review and professor of Constitutional Law, did not know the actual role of the Supreme Court in this area.

Cohn, however, goes further in his article and serves up additional howlers. Cohn points to Obama's attempts the next day to walk back his blooper/lie about the Supreme Court. Here is what Cohn wrote:

Obama corrected and clarified the misstatement one day later. Striking down this sort of economic legislation, Obama said, would be unprecedented in the modern era—and reminiscent of the early 20th Century, when the Court threw out multiple pieces of economic regulations from the Progressive Era and then the New Deal. Here's how Obama put it, word for word:

"We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce—a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal."

The problem here is that the Lochner case did not involve either the commerce clause of the constitution (like Obamacare) nor the power of the federal government (it was about what a state can do). Once again, genius Obama got completely wrong what he said about Constitutional Law. In fact, it was not even close. Indeed, it was so far off base that I have to assume, once again, that Obama was telling lies, this time in an attempt to cover up his prior lie.

Cohn, however, gins up an excuse for the reference to Lochner. Here it is:

To some conservatives, comparing Lochner to a possible decision invalidating the Affordable Care Act makes no sense, because Lochner was about state regulation and the heath care case is about federal regulation. Among those mocking Obama for this comparison was James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal:

"In citing Lochner, the president showed himself to be in over his head. … Lochner, which was effectively reversed in a series of post-New Deal decisions, did not involve a federal law--contrary to the president's claim--and thus had nothing to do with the Commerce Clause, which concerns only the powers of Congress.

It's appalling that any president would have the effrontery to lecture the Supreme Court about a pending case. It's astounding that this president, who was once a professor of constitutional law at an elite university, would do so in such an ignorant fashion."

But Obama's invocation of Lochner here was neither ignorant nor particularly unusual. As Taranto surely knows, historians routinely use “Lochner” as a generic description for those early 20th Century rulings, when the justices were striking down all of those economic regulations.


That's right; historians use Lochner as a general description for all sorts of rulings. Ha, ha, ha. What utter crap. Obama is a lawyer, not an historian. Lawyers (of which I am one) use case names to describe the holding by the court. A holding is the essence of the decision, the central point of the case as it were. A lawyer would no more cite a case about an action by a state to show the proper scope of federal power under the commerce clause than Cohn would look at his list of Christmas presents for next December to determine what food to buy at the supermarket today. Cohn is just spinning, and he is not doing it very well.

It is ashame that the left feel that they have to defend Obama when he tells these whoppers. They do not help Obama, but they bring the lies forward again and again to offend those who know the truth repeatedly. Come to think of it, I hope they keep it up. Anything that can help defeat Obama in November is a good think in my opinion.