For a guy who billed himself as a professor of constitutional law, Barack Obama didn’t have a great track record when his policies appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court. Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon offers the details.
President Barack Obama had the worst record before the Supreme Court in modern history, losing half of the cases argued before the High Court in his two terms, according to a new study.
While liberals point to legalizing same-sex marriage and the upholding of Obamacare subsidies as cementing the former president’s legacy, the study reveals Obama had a much weaker record with the Supreme Court than previous presidents.
The academic study written by Washington University professor Lee Epstein and University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner found Obama had the “worst record of any President” since Franklin D. Roosevelt. In fact, his presidential performance before the Supreme Court “may be the worst since the Zachary Taylor administration” in the 19th century.
“To assess presidential performance in the U.S. Supreme Court, we created a dataset of cases of concern to the president,” Epstein and Posner wrote. “The dataset covers Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt through Barack Obama (1932-2015 terms), which amounts to 84 Court terms and 13 presidents.”
The results were presidents “prevailed in nearly two-thirds of their cases; and captured over 60 [percent] of all votes cast.”
However, Obama’s success rate is “significantly lower” at just 50.5 percent, the lowest Epstein and Posner found.
