Obama is giving community organizers a bad name

Is he lying, deceptive or ignorant? Commentary says he has jumped the shark (a term coined to apply to TV when the program had outlived its freshness and viewers had begun to feel that the show's writers were out of new ideas.)

“Set aside the fact that the House, despite a huge Democratic majority, passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a margin of 219-212, hardly a “strong majority.” In fact, it barely qualifies as a plurality. Let’s turn instead to the substance of what the president said.

Obama, a former community organizer who is perhaps unaware of the finer points of the law, might want to acquaint himself with an obscure 19th century case, Marbury v. Madison, which established the doctrine of judicial review and grants federal courts the power to void acts of Congress that are in conflict with the Constitution. What Obama describes as “unprecedented” has, in fact, been done countless times since 1803.

Then there’s Obama’s confusion about judicial activism. It is not, as he insists, simply the act of overturning an existing law; it is when judges allow their personal views about public policy, and not the Constitution, to guide their decisions and often invent new rights out of thin air. For Justices to invalidate a law they deem to be unconstitutional is precisely what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. (“No legislative act … contrary to the Constitution, can be valid,” is how Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist #78.) If one takes Obama’s words literally, he believes an unjust and unconstitutional law, if passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress, cannot be overturned.”