QOTD: Obama not understood on #SCOTUS because he is a “constitutional law professor”

Literally laughing out loud.  From today’s WH press briefing with Jay Carney:

Henry: The president is a former constitutional law professor. One of his professors is Laurence Tribe. He now says, in his words, the president “obviously misspoke earlier this week”, quote “he didn’t say what he meant and having said that in order to avoid misleading anyone, he had to clarify it.” I thought yesterday you were saying repeatedly that he did not misspeak. What do you make of the president’s former law professor saying he did?

Carney: The premise of your question suggests that the president of the United States in the comments he made Monday, did not believe in the constitutionality of legislation, which is a preposterous premise and I know you don’t believe that.

Henry: Except this is from Laurence Tribe, who knows a lot more than you and I about constitutional law.

Carney: What I acknowledged yesterday is that speaking on Monday the president was not clearly understood by some people because he is a law professor, he spoke in shorthand.

Make sure to watch video of the exchange at that same link.  Priceless.

As I posted on Twitter earlier, I’ve never been the editor of the Harvard Law Review, much less gone to a school as prestigious as Harvard.  Yet I (and many more of us “common folk”) appear to know what the role of the courts are more than our “constitutional law professor President.”  And trust me, that isn’t saying much at all!

Even more hilarity – and heavy doses of Obama administration hypocrisy / selective memory – here (bolded emphasis added by me):

President Obama struck a nerve this week when he took the unusual step of commenting on Supreme Court deliberations, saying it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary” step for the justices to overturn the health-care law that stands as his signature domestic policy achievement.

But the White House was forced to defend the assertion that overturning the health-care law would be unprecedented. According to the Congressional Research Service, the court through 2010 had ruled 165 times that laws passed by Congress were unconstitutional.

Obama himself agreed with some of those decisions, including 2008’s Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled 5-4 that the Military Commissions Act’s suspension of the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo Bay detainees was unconstitutional.

And Wednesday, the administration was in court in Boston explaining why it thinks the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, although it was passed by bipartisan majorities and signed by a Democratic president.

Heh. “Unprecedented” indeed. ;)

You really can’t make this stuff up.

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