2-Faced Obama, Bribing for Gay Vote, will claim Defense of Marriage Act is Unconstitutional

 

 

 

by      Byron York      at the Washington Examiner:                  article sent by Lisa Rich

 

 

TO OBAMA, LEGAL PRECEDENTS ARE ABOUT POLITICS

 

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks during the gay rights organization Human Rights Campaign’s 15th Annual National Dinner at the Washington Convention Center on October 1, 2011.

In 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by huge bipartisan votes — 342 to 67 in The House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.

Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and also creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional. In Boston on Wednesday, Stuart Delery, an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, urged the First Circuit Court of Appeals to find DOMA violates the Constitution by discriminating against gays and lesbians. “I’m not here to defend [the law] on any standard,” Delery told the court.

 

What was striking about Delery’s request that a federal court strike down DOMA was that just a day or two before, President Obama railed at the very notion that a federal court would strike down any law passed by Congress.

 

“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,” Obama said Monday about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation’s highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

 

Obama immediately ran into a barrage of questions. How can the Supreme Court overturning a law be “unprecedented” when the court has done it more than 150 times in U.S. history? And does the president even recognize the court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress?

 

Backtracking, Obama said the next day that “the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it.” He also claimed, without convincing many people, that he called the Obamacare case “unprecedented” because it’s been a while since the court overturned “a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care.”

 

But what about that “strong majority”? When reporters pointed out that Obamacare passed the House by a narrow margin of 219 to 212 votes, White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly revised “strong majority” to simply “majority.”

 

But all that backing and filling — including Carney’s claim that Obama was misunderstood “because he is a law professor” — was before the DOMA arguments made news. If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare?

 

The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one. And perhaps counterproductively, the president’s decision to bring up Obamacare’s history in Congress could end up reminding the public of the tangled circumstances of its passage. Even with a huge majority in the House, Democrats barely passed the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition. And in the Senate, Obamacare succeeded as the result of a set of freakish circumstances that allowed Democrats to pass an unpopular measure into law.

 

Those circumstances included the wrongful prosecution of a Republican senator (Ted Stevens), resulting in his seat going to a Democrat; the defection of another Republican senator (Arlen Specter) to the Democrats; and a change in one state’s laws (Massachusetts) to allow a Democratic governor to immediately appoint a Democrat to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and give the Senate a 60-vote Democratic supermajority. And then there were the policy payoffs to some Democratic senators who were undecided about the bill. Even then, Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for just 134 days before Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, who ran specifically on the platform of stopping Obamacare. But in those 134 days, Democrats managed to pass an unpopular bill into law without a single vote to spare.

 

Now, the timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration’s arguments over constitutionality. And the flap over Obama’s remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June.

 

A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA’s defenders will remind the administration of the president’s respect for duly constituted and passed laws.

Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com

 

R.I.P.  Andrew Breitbart to Occupy Wall Street “Stop Raping People, you Filthy Freaks!”

Ben Stein: “A Know Nothng President…..He’s Getting to Scare Me1″

Ben Stein’s Diary

A Know Nothing

By Ben Stein    at   the American Spectator:

What else besides the Constitution does Mr. Obama not know?

Here, in outline form, is why the pronouncements from President Barack Obama, warning the Supreme Court to not overturn Obamacare. are so chilling:

1. The President supposedly went to Harvard Law School, graduated from same, was Law Review President of the Harvard Law Review at Harvard Law School. Then he supposedly taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Those are powerful law schools. Yet he obviously knows little of how the Constitution works if he thinks it would be rare or startling for the Supreme Court to overrule a law passed by Congress.

Judging whether or not a law is constitutional is precisely, exactly what the Supreme Court does. Passing on the constitutional muster of laws is their job. They do it often with federal laws and with state laws. The Supreme Court overruling legislatures is a commonplace.

If President Obama does not know this, it’s a mark against Harvard and against the University of Chicago. Mostly, it is a serious mark against President Obama.

2. If he does not know how the government works under the Constitution, he should not be President.

3. If he does not know how the Constitution works even in its broadest strokes, what else does he not know?

He apparently thinks that it’s his job to leave Western Europeans and Americans stripped of missile defense. He apparently thinks it’s his job to unilaterally disarm America. That shows a yawning chasm in what he knows and what he does not know.

Another subject Mr. Obama thinks he knows about and doesn’t is the oil companies. He hates them. He thinks they are subsidized by the workers in the cotton fields and then they exploit those workers. That is nonsense. Every business, every household, gets some deductions or credits for something. That’s the way the tax code works. The taxpayers are not subsidizing “Big Oil” and “Big Oil” is now a lot smaller than it was twenty years ago. Now, the state players in the major oil producing states are the big boys. But why does Mr. Obama loathe the oil companies in the first place? They provide an essential product at a market price. They do not fix prices. The provide employment to millions and a comfortable way to travel to hundreds of millions. Why does Mr. Obama hate them? Because of a juvenile, City College of New York circa 1937 leftist view of the whole world. Sad. Disturbing. That is a highly anti-American worldview.

4. Is he really so arrogant that he thinks he can lecture and threaten the Court? This is his second attempt to bully and demean the Court. Is this from arrogance or from foolishness and arrogance? In either case, it is not good.

This man is getting to scare me. I personally am not terribly alarmed about Obamacare. I am terribly alarmed at a President who knows almost nothing about the Constitution. Meanwhile, who taught him Con Law? Time for some restraint. I actually find Mr. Obama likeable and upbeat most of the time. But in this case, he showed way too much of another side.

About the Author

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes “Ben Stein’s Diary” for every issue of The American Spectator.

Comment:   Lefty writers and the core of the Democrat Party boast about how unworkable the Federal Constitution is in our Modern America.    Where would they be educated otherwise?    Not at our Marxist social science sections of university.