The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“S.C. Woman Checking on Rental Home Finds Renters”–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 27
News of the Oxymoronic
“High-Speed Rail Plan to Move at Slower Pace”–headline, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 27
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Apple’s iPad May Underwhelm Hollywood”–headline, Reuters, Jan. 28
The Greenhouse Effect–I
One strong piece of evidence to support our surmise about President Obama… is his apparently unprecedented upbraiding of the U.S. Supreme Court, six of whose members were seated immediately in front of him [during his State of the Union Address] (Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were absent). The occasion of this highly unpresidential outburst was last week’s First Amendment victory in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. [He said]:
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests–including foreign corporations–to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.
…The Associated Press reports that “[Justice Samuel] Alito made a dismissive face and began shaking his head,” and this YouTube clip shows Alito saying what looks to us to be “simply not true.”
Even Linda Greenhouse, the ultraliberal former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, admits that Alito was right:
The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries–as opposed to their political action committees–on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well–although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.
And if Obama has lost Linda Greenhouse, he’s lost Middle America.
But the president’s error–or lie–is worse than Greenhouse acknowledges. The laws whose provisions the court struck down, known as Taft-Hartley and McCain-Feingold, date back to 1947 and 2002, respectively. Greenhouse seems to understand him as claiming that the court had struck down a century-old law. But what he said was that the court had reversed a century of law. In the parlance of constitutional law–a subject Obama once taught–this means that the court undid its own precedent. And indeed the justices did reverse two earlier decisions, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC, These cases, however, were less than 20 years old, having been decided in 1990 and 2003.
If the president of the United States is going to display his contempt for a coequal branch of government and the First Amendment, you’d think he could at least be troubled to get his facts straight.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
