Obama Risks Voter Backlash by Warning Court on Health Law
President Barack Obama has shown a willingness to campaign against the U.S. Supreme Court if the justices strike down his 2010 health-care law. It’s a strategy that’s as risky as it is rare.
With the court months away from a ruling, Obama ratcheted up the political stakes this week by saying a decision to reject the law and its requirement that Americans get insurance would be “judicial activism” by “an unelected group of people.”
Taking on the court would mean fighting an institution that polls show is historically the most admired branch of government. That’s one reason no major party nominee has made the court a central issue since 1968, when Richard Nixon tapped into voters’ unease about rising crime by attacking the expansion of suspects’ rights under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
“The risk any president faces is that criticism of the Supreme Court can backfire,” said William G. Ross, a constitutional law professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, who has written about the role of judicial issues in presidential campaigns. “People can perceive it as unduly disrespectful of an institution that commands tremendous amounts of public respect.”
Declining Ratings
Still, the court’s approval ratings have declined in recent years, and there are indications the public sees politics infusing the biggest rulings. In a Bloomberg National Poll conducted March 8-11, 75 percent of respondents said they expect politics will influence the health-care decision, while only 17 percent said they believe the case will be decided solely on its legal merits. Eight percent said they weren’t sure.
Democrats are increasingly questioning the motives of the court and its majority of five Republican appointees. A decision striking down the law would almost certainly be along party- based lines, with the five Republican-appointed justices joining to invalidate the measure and the four Democratic appointees dissenting.
“It sure looks like a court of conservative activists,” Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York told reporters today.
Obama was training his sights on the court even before the health-care case landed there. The president used part of his 2010 State of the Union address to criticize a court decision letting corporations spend unlimited sums on political advertising, saying it would “open the floodgates” for special interests to “spend without limit in our elections.”