Professor Steven Calabresi writes in today’s WSJ about the difficulty Obama would have in honestly taking the oath of office, calling for him to uphold the Constitution. It’s evident that he wants to subvert the Constitution by having judges read into it all sorts of specious “rights.”
Calabresi is right, but you’d have to go back to Calvin Coolidge (or maybe Grover Cleveland) to find a president who did no violence to the Constitution — no statutes signed, no executive orders issued, no federal regulations promulgated that weren’t at cross-purposes with the intent of the Constitution to limit the power of the state.
Still, this is an issue worth raising. It’s always worth raising, but especially now since our economic crisis is clearly rooted in actions that would never have been enacted if political system respected the Constitution.