The Wall Street Journal has an important editorial noting that some of the emails released earlier this week admitted exactly what we’ve known all along: that the Obama White House orchestrated a campaign to bully the Supreme Court into upholding Obamacare in 2012. After all, why let the law stand in the way of a good plan to politicize the Court?
This week’s leaks show Hillary Clinton ally Neera Tanden laying out a strategy to intimidate the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare.
Ms. Tanden runs the Center for American Progress, the think tank that is essentially an arm of the Clinton campaign. CAP’s former chief, John Podesta,is now the Clinton campaign chairman, and on June 2, 2015 Ms. Tanden sent an email to Jake Sullivan, a key Clinton aide, copying Mr. Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, another campaign operative.
The subject line was “King v. Burwell,” the second big legal case contesting the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, three years after the first case in which the Chief sided with the four liberals to uphold the law.
Ms. Tanden wrote that, “As Jennifer will remember, it was pretty critical that the President threw the gauntlet down last time on the Court, warning them in the first case that it would politicize the role of the Court for them to rule against the ACA. As a close reader of the case, I honestly believe that was vital to scaring Roberts off.”
It worked so well the first time that they were considering doing it again in King v. Burwell, this time through Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign:
In her June 2015 email, Ms. Tanden recommended to her Clinton colleagues that they do the same thing again. “I’m not arguing that Hillary spend a lot of time attacking the Court,” she writes. “I do think it would be very helpful to all of our interest in a decision affirming the law, for [Chief Justice] Roberts and perhaps [Justice Anthony] Kennedy to see negative political consequences to ruling against the government. Therefore, I think it would be helpful to have a story of how progressives and Hillary would make the Supreme Court an election issue (which would be a ready argument for liberals) if the Court rules against the government.”