Shouldn't a President plan for contingencies?
Obama was talking about the contingency of the Supreme Court possibly striking down some or all of the Affordable Care Act, and his asserted reason for not troubling with contingencies is purported confidence that the Supreme Court will not strike down the act.
I simply don't believe that they aren't planning for contingencies. I believe he doesn't want to
talk about contingencies, and I suspect the main contingency is how to present the loss in the Supreme Court to the American people for the purposes of the reelection campaign.
By the way, that quote came in response to a question after Obama angrily scolded Republicans for their budget plan. In these planned remarks,
Obama called the Republican's budget "a Trojan horse disguised as deficit reduction plans":
... it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who's willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward, from the heart of the middle class – and by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that is built to last.
There's video at that second link. He sounds genuinely angry and frustrated. If you're familiar with the history of constitutional law, you will probably connect that reference to "social Darwinism" to the so-called
Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court looked more deeply into the reasonableness of legislation. In the case that gives the era its name,
Lochner v. New York,
Justice Holmes dissented and said, enigmatically, "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's
Social Statics," which is generally taken to refer to Social Darwinism.
See the resonance with the argument in favor of the Affordable Care Act?
Obama has been asserting that if the Supreme Court strikes down the Act, it will be a throwback to the
Lochner Era. I think we're seeing his big campaign theme: conservatives — on and off the Court — are the tool of the wealthy in their oppression of the less-than-wealthy.
So let me rethink the disbelief I expressed in the second paragraph of this post, because a different phrase in the post-title quote jumps out at me now:
a whole bunch of time. He didn't say he wasn't planning for contingencies. He said he was not spending
a whole bunch of time planning for contingencies.
Suddenly, I believe
that. It doesn't take a whole bunch of time to slot that Supreme Court loss into the class warfare template. It can be done in the blink of an eye... the jerk of a knee.
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