President Obama, Fair Weather Friend of the Court [Urged Strike Down of Partial-Birth Ban Act]

The Weekly Standard ^ | April 03,2012 | ADAM J. WHITE

[Steelfish]

President Obama, Fair Weather Friend of the Court APR 3, 2012 • BY ADAM J. WHITE Not even a full year into President Obama's first term, Politico observed that he had reached the point of caricature in using the term "unprecedented" to describe basically anything that occurs during his presidency. By now, Americans have learned to shrug off his use of this rhetorical tick.

And yesterday it happened again when the president challenged the Supreme Court not to strike down Obamacare's individual mandate, a judicial act that would "be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

As Jeffrey Anderson and others have noted, this is just silly. There is nothing "unprecedented" about the Supreme Court striking down federal laws—even federal laws passed with broad congressional support. The Court has struck down scores of federal laws, and often rightly so.

But I would like to note one particular statute that survived judicial review: the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. More specifically, I note then-senator Obama's reaction when the Supreme Court affirmed that law, in Carhart v. Gonzales. In a 2007 speech to Planned Parenthood, he criticized the Court for not striking down that federal law, and called on the Court to be more aggressive in striking down federal laws:

[taterjay]

One word-—Buffoon