On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a
survey of likely voters showing that in less than one month the
percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court’s job
performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an
all-time low of 28 percent to a two-and-a-half year high of 41
percent. This time frame includes the Court’s hearings on Obamacare
as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to
strike down his signature law.
In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the
Court is there for, they are more positive about its theoretical
and actual function.
In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among
Republicans has gone from 29 percent favorable to 54 percent
favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren’t on board the Supreme
Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn’t give the numbers but
says that Democrats’ “views of the court are largely
unchanged.”
Most important politically, “among voters not affiliated with
either of the major political parties, good or excellent ratings
for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now.”
Also among the poll results — and more bad news for Democrats
— twice as many Americans believe that the Supreme Court “does not
limit the government enough” (30 percent) as those who think it
“puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do”
(15 percent).
How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President?
It is lucky for Republicans that President Barack Obama lives in
a radical leftist echo chamber which reinforces his delusions that
he’s the second coming of FDR —
as well as of Teddy
Roosevelt, Abraham
Lincoln, Ronald
Reagan, Mahatma
Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, just to name a few.
Obama is a poor student of history, and not just of Supreme
Court history
despite his prior position as a “Senior Lecturer” in constitutional
law. And without understanding the past, the president thinks of
FDR’s 1930s attack on the Supreme Court as part and parcel of
Roosevelt’s being elected to the presidency four times.
This explains Obama’s
rhetoric all but daring the Court to strike down Obamacare, or
at least its individual mandate provision — a dare that Judge
Jeffrey Smith recently challenged the administration to defend. The
defense, in the form of a letter
from Attorney General Eric Holder, reeked of “you can do it, but
you really shouldn’t” condescension, and notably did not claim to
represent the views of President Obama, but simply of the Justice
Department.
What the echoes from Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and Debbie
“We can call it ‘Obamacare’
now” Wasserman Schultz will miss is that attacking the Court was
not a political success for FDR, with support for Roosevelt’s
court-packing plan falling
under opposition among the public within about one month of the
plan’s announcement, and never recovering.
The public may not love the Supreme Court but that does not mean
they support its assault by other branches of government. Now, as
in 1937, Republicans, out of some mixture of principle and
politics, were forceful in defense of the Court’s independence. But
then as
now, it was not only Republicans who objected to the
presidents’ tyrannical overreach.
In a 1937
editorial, presaging public reaction against Democrats and FDR
the following year, William Allen White, the Progressive editor of
the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, railed against
Roosevelt’s assault on the independence of the Supreme Court: “But
while crying against these economic royalists [much like Obama’s
demonization of “the 1 percent”] he would seem to have harbored
subconsciously a seven-devil lust to become an unconstitutional
royalist himself.”
White continued: “[T]hose who scorn the orderly processes of
democracy, those leaders who by instinctive indirection slip around
our laws and annul the basic implications of American democracy,
they become a menace more deadly than the economic royalists whom
Roosevelt denounces.”
Perhaps Obama’s self-comparisons to the anti-constitution FDR
are not so far-fetched after all.
In the 1938 mid-term elections, Republicans gained House seats
for the first time in a decade, picking up a stunning 81 seats in
the House of Representatives, or 18.6 percent of that chamber. Even
the Republican tsunami of 2010 only caused a GOP pickup of 63
seats, or 14.4 percent, although Republicans began the most recent
mid-term elections with twice as many seats (178) as the party held
during their hapless years going into 1938 (88).
Much like George W. Bush in the last decade, in the 1920s,
Herbert Hoover did substantial damage to the Republican brand,
saddling the GOP with back to back disastrous elections (in 1930
and 1932, in which Republicans lost a total of 148 House seats);
1938 marked the first Republican gains in the House for a decade
and the first gains in a mid-term election since 1918.
It is true that FDR won re-election in 1940, and perhaps this is
the bulletin that is bouncing around inside the White House echo
chamber, but FDR was far more popular than Barack Obama, and the
nation was heading into war — always an advantage for an
incumbent. While Republicans remained the minority party in
Congress, the 1938 landslide following FDR’s court-packing scheme
remains the largest gain for either party in the House of
Representatives since 1894 and arguably ended
any expansion of the New Deal.
Because Democrats either don’t know this or don’t think the
lessons of history apply to them, the Obama administration has been
shocked — shocked! — that its verbal mugging of the Court has
been politically ineffective at best. Perhaps, like Obamacare
itself, the administration believed that once we really understood
its position, we’d come to like it better.
As usual, its projections don’t reflect reality, and now the
Rasmussen data support the obvious fact that attacking the Court
isn’t working outside of the left’s already-committed base.
An interesting political question remains how a Supreme Court
decision will impact the presidential election. Democrats, such as
James Carville,
suggest that if the Court overturns the law (or the mandate),
it will be a tremendous benefit to Democrat electoral hopes. Color
me skeptical.
Even Democrat pollster Pat Caddell says that Obamacare is likely
be a political
loser for Barack Obama, whether or not he wins reelection —
and deserves to be, because of how the law destroys consumer
choice, raises prices, and centralizes health care decisions and
power in Washington.
As Scott Rasmussen put it in a recent
op-ed, “For something as fundamental as medical care,
government policy must be consistent with deeply held American
values. That’s why an approach that increases consumer choice has
solid support and a plan that relies on mandates and trusting the
government cannot survive.”
Obamacare and the role of the Supreme Court will be a fierce
debate, and is likely to remain central to the presidential
campaign regardless of the Court’s verdict. It is too early to know
just how the arguments will play out, or who will win them.
But what we do know is that the president’s echo chamber will
keep him mired, at least on these issues, in leftist talking points
that those outside the bubble would recognize as ineffective
campaign material, not least because of the lessons of the
1930s.
For the Democrats’ narcissistic, historically ignorant
group-think, perfectly exemplified by the president’s attacks on
the Supreme Court, Republicans should be grateful. It is one of the
few reasons a moderately inspiring GOP nominee may be able to beat
a dangerous and incompetent but “historic” incumbent president.
