Opinion

High court crisis?

A US Court of Appeals panel yesterday ordered the Justice Department to answer a simple question: Does the Obama administration believe federal courts have the right to review and overturn acts of Congress?

It’s a logical question, given how President Obama on Monday openly called into question the US Supreme Court’s power to determine constitutional legitimacy.

Most people thought that was settled in 1803, as legal scholar Michael McConnell details on the preceding page.

Nevertheless, Obama said he was “confident” the court “will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law [ObamaCare] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

That’s an extraordinary assertion, coming from a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Either he’s astonishingly ignorant.

Or he was trying to bully the High Court.

Or he just takes Americans for morons.

Or maybe all of the above.

In any event, his slurs and threats ill-serve the nation — whatever one’s position on his health-care reform.

Again, America has accepted the notion of judicial review for 209 years.

For the nation’s chief executive to call that tradition into disrepute — whether to browbeat the justices into blessing his reform, or as sour grapes in case they don’t — only serves to corrode the legitimacy of and trust in America’s three-branch, checks-and-balances system of government.

Sure, other presidents have argued bitterly with the court — FDR tried, in effect, to destroy it. Obama no doubt wants his signature piece of legislation to survive.

Nonetheless, the president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws the justices have the right to strike down.

So it’s no wonder that a federal appeals-court panel is demanding that the administration explain, in writing, whether it recognizes the court’s power.

If not, a constitutional crisis could loom.

If so, Obama needs to back off.