President Barack Obama received a strong rebuke from the Supreme Court last week for his attempt to make appointments when Congress was still technically in session.
The 9-0 decision in National Labor Relations Board vs. Noel Canning came just as Speaker John Boehner announced plans to sue Obama for executive overreach.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who defended Boehner’s lawsuit, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was emblematic of Obama’s term. Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the "9-0 decision last week was the 13th time the Supreme Court has voted 9-0 that the president has exceeded his constitutional authority."
Has Obama really had such a tough time with the high court? We decided to review the record.
Goodlatte isn’t the only person to make this argument. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, made a similar claim in a press release last week and it was also the subject of a column in the National Review, a conservative news website.
A spokeswoman for Goodlatte gave us a list of the 13 cases he referenced. We reviewed the evidence his office offered enlisted the help of a few experts to help us parse through the legalese.
Goodlatte’s assertion doesn’t seem to hold water. Susan Bloch, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, said the NLRB case is very different than the rest of the cases on the list, in that the court actually was ruling on a separations of power issue and a presidential overreach.
"That’s a fair case of the president’s use of executive authority getting rejected," she said.
But the rest of the claim? "It’s a total overstatement," Bloch said.
For starters, in eight of the cases, the alleged overreach occurred under President George W. Bush, as did the court cases that challenged the administration (United States vs. Jones, Sackett vs. EPA, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School vs. EEOC, Gabelli vs. SEC, Arkansas Fish & Game Commission v. United States, PPL Corp. vs. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Horne vs. USDA, and Bond vs. United States). Bush’s Justice Department handled the initial court proceedings in most instances.
Obama’s Justice Department in many of the cases handled the appellate process and ultimately defended the actions to the Supreme Court. But that’s commonplace, experts we spoke with said.
Goodlatte spokeswoman Jessica Collins contended that doesn't make the chairman's statement untrue. "Regardless of who started the policies that were overturned by the courts unanimously during the Obama administration, President Obama decided to continue those policies which were struck down," she said.
But that isn't really what Goodlatte claimed. He said Obama "exceeded his presidential authority," not that Obama defended executive overreach.