SCOTUS is going to review the “take care” clause. This is huge, and a potential opportunity to finally rein in a tyrannical executive.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More at the WaPo from Fred Barbash:
In the view of Texas and others, Obama admitted both that he had no power under the law and that he thus, in his words, “changed the law” while pretending that he wasn’t. Bad faith.
“There generally wouldn’t be any evidence of bad faith,” Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, who formulated the winning Commerce Clause argument in the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. “But here we have public declarations [from Obama] that ‘I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority’ and that ‘Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act’ and then you also have the enactment of what looks like legal rules, not just discretion, but whole classes of people who are exempt from the law, the very same law the president was urging Congress to pass….it suggests that he’s not acting in good faith.”
You don’t say.
I’m not expecting an unfavorable ruling toward Obama from the man who said “it’s a tax, not a fine”, then ignored that tax bills MUST originate in the House. I expect that Justice Roberts will engage in doubletalk to protect Obama, in much the same way that the Supreme Court doubletalked to pretend that the Superfund bill was not ex post facto law.
Even if they did rule against him, how much would it matter? Does anyone thing Loretta Lynch would say “ok, we lost, gotta stop ignoring these illegals?”
I really wonder how some of the court liberals will vote on this, and I mean that seriously.
Yes, they’re inclined to back Obama, but… they are also surely aware that Obama is in his final months, and his successor has at least an even-odds chance of being a Republican. And, more than that, a Republican whom many say has a penchant for authoritarianism.
Therefor, perhaps, I think it’s quite possible that the liberals won’t vote in lockstep on this one; one or two may vote to reign in presidential excesses with a President Trump, not President Obama, in mind.