The Petulant President

"This should be an easy case. Frankly it probably shouldn’t have been taken up. It’s important for us to go ahead and assume that the Supreme Court is going to do what most legal scholars who have looked at this would expect them to do. I’m optimistic the Supreme Court will play it straight. Congress could fix this whole thing with a one-sentence provision.”


Obama’s pressured the Justices: Do you really want to kill a law that is now a routine part of American life?
“Five years in, what we are talking about is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. It isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America.”

“Once you see millions of people having health care, once you see that all the bad things that were predicted didn’t happen, you’d think that it’d be time to move on. “It seems so cynical to want to take coverage away from millions of people, to take care away from the people who need it the most, to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America. It is not something that should be done based on a twisted interpretation of four words.”

President Obama, in June 8 Press Conference in Germany, on impending Supreme Court decision on federal subsidies

The President is entitled to his opinion, but not to belittling the Supreme Court’s judgment or that of a Congress who wrote the law. In the U.S, with its 3 branches of government and its checks and balances, it is not the President's way or the highway, it is what the Court decides about the limits of the executive and legislative branches and what is constitutional. It is not about questioning or ridiculing the Court. It is about awaiting the Court's considered opinion.