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Wednesday 19 October 2016

The Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin Review


I thought Jeffrey Toobin’s The Obama White House and the Supreme Court would be about any conflict between the President and the Supreme Court with the focus on the most controversial policy of the last eight years, Obamacare. Instead, most of this short is about Chief Justice Roberts’ botched Presidential Oath at the 2009 inauguration – what an uninteresting subject to write about! 

All you need to know about this incident is that Obama redid the oath in private, in front of a selection of witnesses from the press, so as to avoid any potential challenge from nutbars that he somehow wasn’t the real president. But Toobin goes into excessive detail on the trivial bits of pettiness that was the fallout from Roberts screwing up the oath and none of it is worth reading.

The rest of the short explains why Obama chose politics over a legal career after deciding the courts are an ineffective means of societal change. Also, Obama and Roberts are both different people with different points of view. W…o…w… 

It’s well-written and provides about as much information as anyone could possibly want about the botched oath but, like a lot of American nonfiction, Jeffrey Toobin takes a helluva long time to say very little!

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