Topic: Newsmax
In claiming that President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is "a play right out of the standard Democratic dirty-tricks playbook: the race hustle," Scott Wheeler, in his June 1 Newsmax column, distorts Obama's comments on the Constitution and the Supreme Court made in a 2001 interview:
A chilling, January 2001 interview reveals what far-reaching consequences Obama-styled “empathy” can have for the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. “The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society,” Obama told an interviewer for a Chicago radio station.
He went on to complain that when ultra-liberal, judicial activist Earl Warren was chief justice of the Supreme Court “it didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”
He seems to really miss that the whole point of the Constitution was to prevent tyrants from “break[ing] free” from the rule of law and declaring themselves the final arbiters of what is legal. But, then again, maybe he doesn’t miss that point at all.
In fact, as we've documented, Obama did not say what Wheeler accuses him of saying.He did not "complain" that the Warren Court "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution"; rather, he said that Warren was not as "ultra-liberal" as Wheeler thinks he is because his court "didn't break free." At no point does Obama endorse "breaking free," and Wheeler is lying when he claims Obama did.
