The Supreme Court in Washington. In his more than six years in the White House, Obama has to an unusual degree — for a serving president — offered strong opinions on how the court’s justices should decide cases central to his legacy. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
President Obama seemed to relish the chance to take yet another swipe at the Supreme Court justices who were deliberating a case that could determine the fate of his landmark health-care law.
“This should be an easy case,” he said earlier this month regarding the latest legal showdown over the Affordable Care Act. “Frankly, it probably shouldn’t even have been taken up.”
This time the president was taking questions from reporters at a recent summit of world leaders in Germany. The case before the court would decide whether millions of Americans who receive tax subsidies to buy health insurance on federal exchanges are doing so illegally.
In his more than six years in the White House, Obama has to an unusual degree — for a serving president — offered strong opinions on how the court’s justices should decide cases central to his legacy. In a few instances, those pointed opinions have sounded a lot like outright criticism.
Obama’s willingness to plunge into the court’s business reflects his background as a constitutional law lecturer, his irritation with the legal and political wrangling surrounding the landmark health-care law and his view of the court’s role in American society.
“There’s a view that liberals love the courts as the last bastion” for defending the rights of the powerless and underprivileged, said David Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “He’s never bought into that stuff. He believes that the courts are fine, but that politics should run the country.”
That view was especially clear in 2012 when the justices were reviewing the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. At the time Obama argued that the court hadn’t overturned a law on a major economic issue, such as health care, since its battles with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the New Deal. “Let me be very specific,” Obama said. “We have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health-care” for decades.
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