President Obama has seen 20 unanimous defeats before the Supreme Court during the five and a half years of his presidency, a pace that outstrips former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, according to a review of his record since 2009 by Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas).
“President Obama’s unanimous Supreme Court loss rate, for the five and half years of his presidency, is nearly double that of President Bush and is 25 percent greater than President Clinton,” Cruz notes in a survey of how Obama’s lawyers performed before the high court. Bush lost 15 cases unanimously, while Clinton lost 23 — but those defeats came over an eight-year period. When Cruz released his first report on the topic in April of 2013, he pointed out that Obama had lost nine cases unanimously since January of 2012. This latest installment takes account of the four most recent unanimous rulings against Obama, and the seven handed down by the court before 2012.
The defeats include cases such: as Judalang v. Holder, when the court faulted the Obama team for making an “arbitrary and capricious” attempt to rewrite the rules governing who is eligible for relief from deportation; Henderson ex rel. Henderson v. Shinseki, in which Obama’s lawyers argued wrongly “that the Department of Veterans Affairs can wholly ignore a veteran’s appeal of a VA regional office’s benefits ruling when the appeal was not filed within the 120-day deadline”; and Bond v. United States, in which the “DOJ argued that an international treaty gave Congress the power to create federal criminal law for wholly local conduct.”
“This tally does not capture all of the Obama Administration’s losing arguments, as it does not include unanimous rejections for more governmental power made in the Obama Administration’s friend-of-the-court (amicus) briefs supporting non-federal parties, which would put the Obama Administration’s losses much higher,” Cruz wrote.
The Texas freshman detailed the significance of Obama’s more recent defeats in his April 2013 report.
“If the Department of Justice had won these cases, the federal government would be able to electronically track all of our movements, fine us without a fair hearing, dictate who churches choose as ministers, displace state laws based on the president’s whims, bring debilitating lawsuits against individuals based on events that occurred years ago, and destroy a person’s private property without just compensation,” Cruz explained.
“When President Obama’s own Supreme Court nominees join their colleagues in unanimously rejecting the administration’s call for broader federal power nine times in 18 months, the inescapable conclusion is that the Obama administration’s view of federal power knows virtually no bounds,” he concluded.
You can see the whole Cruz series here.