Mark Steyn: Wait and see how flexible Obama will be

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Mark Steyn: Wait and see how flexible Obama will be

 

Published: April 6, 2012 Updated: April 7, 2012 9:37 a.m.

 

By MARK STEYN

 

Syndicated columnist

 

As Bob Hope and Bing Crosby observed in "The Road To Bali":

 

"He gets his shirts straight from

Paris

 

Cigarettes from the

Nile

 

He talks like a highbrow

 

But he plays Chicago style..."

 

I've no idea where President Barack Obama gets his shirts and smokes, but he certainly talks like a highbrow, sufficiently so to persuade presidential historian Michael Beschloss to pronounce him the day after the 2008 election "the smartest president ever." Yet, in the end, he plays Chicago style. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can't take the Chicago out of the community organizer. Or as the Agence France-Presse headline put it, "Combative Obama Warns Supreme Court On Health Law."

 

Headlines in which the executive "warns" the courts are usually the province of places like Balochistan, where powerful Cabinet ministers are currently fuming at the Chief Justice's determination to stop them kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom – literally, that is, not merely figuratively, as in

America. But, here as there, when Obama "warns" the Supreme Court "over health law," it's their health prospects he has in mind. He cautioned the justices – "an unelected group of people" – not to take the "unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

 

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: as the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an "unprecedented" step so unprecedented there are two centuries' worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging "the Court's legitimacy."

 

All that's unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the

United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, "Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it."

 

A nation can have formal "checks and balances,"

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