It’s a bad day for a liberal President when even Justice Ginsburg rules against you. Not only did the Obama Administration fail to convince the court’s only openly Marxist jurist serving on the bench, but they also have to live with the notion that she wrote the concurring opinion. This case marks the second time during Administration that President Obama has had one of his policies lose in the Supreme Court. While he is not the first President to find himself on the wrong side of the question of Constitutionality, he is still 0 for 2. This is not the record we would have expected for a person who was marketed to the country as a, “Constitutional Scholar.”
His first smack down came in January of this year if you will remember, when a 9 to 0 decision said basically that Barack Obama, or any President does not have the authority to tell churches who they could and could not hire based on the religious leanings of the church. In that case, a Lutheran Church ran a private school, and made the decision to hire as teachers, only those people that they felt would be good role models for passing on the Lutheran message as it pertains to all things educational. In other words, they wanted their teachers to be Christians, and to pass those beliefs on to their students. This is what the parents who sent their kids to a Lutheran school wanted, and this is what the owners of the school wanted. President Obama disagreed. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church Vs. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the court decided that a President was not allowed to violate the First Amendment because his ultimate goal is to put an end to the practice of any religion other than Islam in America, nor for any other reason that he might have.
Yesterday’s loss, which makes him Zero for Two, came in the form of Sackett vs. The Environmental Protection Agency. In this particular case, The EPA decided that they would prevent the Sackett’s from building a house on a piece of property that they owned. The EPA decided that the property consisted of, or was located on wetlands in Idaho. Here is where it gets dicey, they did not want to defend their position in court, and decided to dispense with the entire concept of due process. They thought a good way to do this would be to tell the Sacketts that they thought it was possible that their property was inappropriate to build a house on, and therefore they should stop while the EPA took an indefinite amount of time to consider the matter. They threatened to fine the Sacketts $35,000 per day for each day the Sacketts defied the order to stop building, and then further threatened to increase the fines to $70,000 per day if the Sacketts challenged them in court. Nice! So, for those of you keeping score at home, Little Barry read the Constitution and decided that the Fifth Amendment meant that he could circumvent Due Process by simply declaring that it was possible that a person was doing wrong without ever actually alleging it. Since the allegation was never actually made, then a fair and speedy trial would never be warranted, regardless of the fact that deprivation of property was ongoing, permanent, and beyond redress.
The Supreme Court yesterday did not agree. The decision was unanimous, not that the Sacketts could start building, but that due process must be granted. For those who believe that this decision was limited in scope, and therefore not terribly important, I disagree. It is a shot across the bow of a President who has been effectively creating law by executive fiat since he lost control of the Legislative Branch in January of 2011. Things that Obama does are making their way to the Supreme Court in rapid fashion, and I do not believe that to be an accident either. One other interesting thing to note here, he lost 9 to 0 on this one. Putting aside any of the idiotic claims that this man is somehow a Constitutional Scholar, in his two trips to the Supreme Court so far, he has a combined score of 18 against, and 0 in favor of himself. This does not exactly inspire confidence in his understanding of, or even his promise to uphold our founding document. By writing a concurring opinion, Justice Ginsburg, the farthest left member of the court basically told the man child President that he has gone too far. Removing Due Process prior to deprivation of Life, Liberty, or Property is the stuff that monarchs do to their subjects. This is not something Presidents do to their fellow citizens.
The bad news for President Obama is that this is not going to be his last trip to the Supreme Court. On Monday, he gets to go again, and this one will be a dozy.
Cross Posted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.
