You probably remember yesterday’s post by RedState’s Leon Wolf about how the President’s bizarre commentary on the Supreme Court (essentially, Barack Obama seems to think that constitutionality is in the eye of the supine legislature whose members promptly got decimated in the next Congressional election) demonstrates pretty much an explicit disdain for, and rejection of, the very doctrine of judicial review. Leon finished by saying “…if any Republican had said this, the media would be busily trying to paint them as an uneducated rube who was unaware of Marbury v. Madison – when Obama says it, it’s presented as a thoughtful defense of his brilliant law.” Fast forward to the NY Sun (H/T: Glenn Reynolds), whose own appalled look at the utter inanity of what Obama said – their editorial title “Ex Parte Obama,” given the subject matter of the post, is actually a rather serious accusation, in context – went down similar but distinct lines:
It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton. It is the essay in which Hamilton, a big proponent of federal power, famously described the Court as “the weakest of the three departments of power.” It argued that the people could never be endangered by the court — so long as the judiciary “remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.”
Now, I have a confession to make. As many of you know, I started out life as a Democrat; and while I have been doing my best to make up the gaps of scholarship that naturally resulted because of that I am not entirely caught up, even after over half a decade. Specifically, I have not yet read the entirety of the Federalist Papers – so, since apparently neither has Barack Obama, I will correct both of our deficiencies in scholarship by including the entirety of Federalist #78 after the fold. I invite whichever administration flunky monitoring this website to print this post out and make sure that his/her ultimate boss sees it; because as a constitutional law scholar Barack Obama makes an excellent… say, what is Barack Obama excellent at, anyway? It’s been seven years since he first hit the national scene, and I’m frankly underwhelmed. Continue reading Constitutional Law 090 for President Obama: The Federalist Papers (#78).