Tag Archives: supreme court

Bully in Chief

President Obama seems to be auditioning for a lead role in the documentary, Bully. He tried to intimidate the U.S. Supreme Court while flanked, in the Rose Garden, by Mexican President Calderon and Candadian Prime Minister Harper. The administration’s Fast and Furious “gun walking” program has contributed to mayhem and death in the Mexican Drug War, and Obama thumped Canada by blocking the Keystone pipeline.

It's Becoming a Pattern

For good measure he later lashed out at House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, calling him a Social Darwinian. So there.

 

 

Obamacare Severance Day

If you’re going to poach a cartoon go big. This is from Join, or Die, America’s first editorial cartoon, by Ben Franklin.

Severability is a precise legal term meaning to chop up into itty bitty pieces.

Can the Government Make you Buy Broccoli?

 

 

I thought Kennedy had a more interesting question when he asked, “Can the government create commerce in order to regulate it?”

Check the thumbnail for a retread answer to yesterday’s questioning.

 

Health Care Tax

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-up (1936)

Here’s Justice Alito, quoted in the NYT:

“Today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax,” he told Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the administration’s lead advocate. “Tomorrow you are going to be back and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?”

Here’s President Obama answering Alito’s question.


Nasty Free Speech

101008bokloresThe creeps who protest at the funerals of dead soldiers appeared before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. They were sued by the father of Matthew Snyder, a marine whose funeral they picketed. The protesters are led by a preacher named Fred Phelps. Their beef is with homosexuality and they claim that dead soldiers are God’s punishment. The thing is, unless the Supreme Being files a brief, they may be well within their rights. A 1988 court ruling, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, unanimously upheld the right to nasty speech unless it can be proven false.

USA Today has a complete story with video.