BREAKING: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Obama’s Power Grab

Supreme Court Justices

BREAKING: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Obama’s Power Grab

President Obama has had an up and down relationship with the Supreme Court. He publicly admonished them during his 2010 State of the Union address over theirCitizens United decision, but sang their praises when they upheld Obamacare by ruling it a tax.
He may not like future rulings from the Court on Obamacare though, as they are considering the Hobby Lobby case regarding the abortion mandate provision of Obamacare and how it infringes on religious liberty. They may also soon be considering a Constitutional challenge of the healthcare law on the grounds that it violated the ‘Origination Clause‘ by being introduced in the Senate instead of the House, where tax bills are required to begin.
Obama doesn’t have many fans on the Supreme Court either, with even his ultra-liberal nominees to the Court ruling against him at times. Justice Scalia has been especially critical of Obama, calling him a “self-interested President” and decrying his continuous power grabs.
One such power grab by the Obama administration was just struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court, who ruled against Obama’s “boundless” interpretation of a chemical weapons law used to convict a woman of an international crime for a simple local assault case. (H/T Reason)

At issue in Bond v. United States was the conviction of Carol Anne Bond, a Pennsylvania woman sentenced to six years in federal prison under the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act after she smeared two toxic substances on the door knob and car door of a woman who had been carrying on an affair with Bond’s husband. According to Bond, the federal government exceeded its enumerated powers by making a federal crime out of her purely local offense. Today, the Supreme Court ruled in Bond’s favor.
The Obama administration’s “boundless” interpretation of the chemical weapons law, declared the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, “would transform the statute from one whose core concerns are acts of war, assassination, and terrorism into a massive federal anti-poisoning regime that reaches the simplest of assaults.”

Even the four liberal Justices joined in the decision, saying the federal law had noapplication in the matter.

“an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband’s lover, which ended up causing only a minor thumb burn readily treated by rinsing with water.” The power to prosecute such acts rests entirely in the hands of the states, the Court concluded. “There is no reason to think the sovereign nations that ratified the [Chemical Weapons] Convention were interested in anything like Bond’s common law assault.”

The three conservative Justices, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, concurred in the decision to overturn Bond’s conviction, but wrote their own opinion on the matter, feeling that the unanimous decision actually didn’t go far enough.

In contrast to Roberts, these three justices argued that the chemical weapons law did cover Bond’s conduct, and therefore the law should be struck down on constitutional grounds. “As sweeping and unsettling as the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998 may be, it is clear beyond doubt that it covers what Bond did,” wrote Justice Scalia. “So we are forced to decide—there is no way around it—whether the Act’s application to what Bond did was constitutional. I would hold that it was not.”

You can read the Court’s opinion of Bond v. United States here.
This is good news. The Supreme Court has stepped up and pushed back against the constant power grab by the Obama administration. There was absolutely no reason for the federal government to charge that women under a law designed for international war crimes and terrorism, especially considering her crime was a simple assault case that should have been handled at the County level, at most the state level.
The Obama administration was simply seeking a way to expand on the already expansive federal reach, setting a precedent for the feds to involve themselves in simple local crimes for any reason, if they so choose. They need to be stopped, and the federal government needs to be put back in it’s place, which isn’t getting involved in local crimes and prosecution that the states are more than capable of handling on their own.
Please share this on Facebook and Twitter if you are glad the Supreme Court rejected another one of Obama’s power grabs, and hope they will continue to strike his administration down as they continue their ever constant quest to expand their power and influence.