Brett Logiurato:
Two years ago, President Barack Obama stood in jubilation, hugging the White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler after finding out the Supreme Court had upheld his signature domestic achievement.
Two years later, amid the most significant challenge to the Affordable Care Act since that moment, Obama didn’t have much to cheer about. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, split along the normal conservative-liberal judicial lines, found the law’s contraception mandate violated certain companies’ rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“We disagree, and the constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees, with that conclusion from the Supreme Court,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday.
There’s been little solace for Obama this Supreme Court term. In addition to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Obama administration and the causes it has supported have experienced a handful of high-profile setbacks before the high court.
Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to public-sector unions, ruling that some employees couldn’t be forced to pay dues. Last week, in a unanimous, 9-0 rebuke, the justices ruled Obama had overstepped his constitutional authority when he went around Congress and unilaterally appointed three members to the National Labor Relations Board.
Also last week, the high court unanimously struck down a law that had established 35-foot “buffer zones” at abortion clinics in Massachusetts. And earlier this term, the court dealt the most serious blow to campaign-finance laws since the landmark Citizens United decision in 2010.
Earnest was asked if Obama was concerned or frustrated about the way the term went for the administration.
“I’d hesitate to make a broad assessment like that from this podium,” Earnest said.
But other legal experts and the president’s political opponents have taken notice. Since January 2012, the Obama administration has suffered at least 13 unanimous defeats in cases it argued (not counting cases in which it filed an amicus brief), according to the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, told Business Insider that while 5-4 decisions can be blamed on the conservative-liberal split of the court, unanimous decisions are “indicative of an administration that pushes and breaks through the envelope in its assertion of federal power.”
Added a GOP Senate aide in an email to Business Insider: “Recent court decisions say as much about Democrat overreach as they do about anything else, and no data point underscores that more clearly than the dozen unanimous defeats they’ve handed to Obama.”
