...Nevertheless, the left is pushing many such non-legal arguments, including that the court shouldn’t overturn a “popular” legislative act. Even the president advanced this argument as recently as last month, although the ACA is not, in fact, all that popular.
Speaking in the Rose Garden, Obama said: “Ultimately, 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.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy also recently publicly lobbied Roberts, saying he trusts that the chief justice has “a strong institutional sense of the proper role of the judicial branch.” And, “it would be extraordinary for the Supreme Court not to defer to Congress in this matter that so clearly affects interstate commerce.”
This not-so-stealth campaign to influence the Supreme Court is obnoxious, if not unethical. It is also factually challenged. Overturning a law would not be unprecedented or extraordinary, as any first-year law student could tell you, but don’t take my word for it. Harvard University’s Laurence Tribe, one of Obama’s professors and a leading liberal scholar of constitutional law, said that his former student “obviously misspoke.”
