Thread by @bansisharma

1. Authoritarianism: Trump vs. Obama

Since it is a favorite slur of the left to label Trump as an authoritarian, I thought I would establish a baseline of facts against which we can track the reality of the Trump presidency objectively.

2. Since our Constitution is uniquely antithetical to authoritarianism (U.S. in its very founding made government subservient to people, not the other way around), it is well nigh impossible for an American president to be authoritarian without falling afoul of the Constitution.

3. So, one objective way to measure the sweep of presidential actions is to track the number and type of presidential initiatives that end up being adjudicated in the highest court in the land, and see how they hold up when adjudged for Constitutional compliance.

4. It has been my oft repeated contention for a long time now that, for all his verbal bluster, Trump has not colored outside the Constitutional lines so far, and is very likely to maintain a good streak throughout his presidency. Still relatively early days. Time will tell.

5. One thing we already and objectively know though is that Obama was the "most overridden by SCOTUS" in the history of our nation. What does that say about his authoritarianism? The left does itself no favors by trying to bury its collective head in the sand on that count.

6. Allow me to hold up a mirror to Obama presidency in terms of its track record in the Supreme Court cases. It is particularly piquant in the light of the fact that President Obama himself was a constitutional lawyer who even taught constitutional law for a while.

7. One can be forgiven for the impression as though Obama studied the constitution with a view to push the envelope on subverting it. Sorry for the bluntness, but I cannot shake his disgraceful berating of SCOTUS justices in front of the world in one of his SOTU addresses.

8. There is no other U.S. president who was overruled by SCOTUS more than Obama, at the very least not in the last 50 years based on the data I have been able to locate, and by a wide margin. Obama managed to win only about 45% of his cases: 79 Wins, 96 losses.

9. Bush won 60%, Clinton 63%, Senior Bush 70%, Reagan 75%, Carter 68%. Government average all the way back to 1960 is comfortably over 60%.

10. You could argue, of course, that a simple win-loss rate does not tell the whole story. After all, Obama’s solicitors general faced a bench occupied by a majority of Republican appointees. (As did Clinton’s, but that didn’t stop him from doing better than his GOP successor.)

11. But the news gets even worse when you look at unanimous losses, which include losses in which President Obama’s own nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, ruled against him.

12. Obama had 44 unanimous losses. For comparison, George W. Bush suffered 30 unanimous losses, while Bill Clinton withstood 31. In other words, Obama lost unanimously 50 percent more than his two immediate predecessors.

13. Lastly, these cases had been in such disparate areas as criminal procedure, religious liberty, property rights, immigration, securities regulation, tax law, and the separation of powers. In other words, across a wide sweep of presidential powers.

I rest my case.

The END

Credit: In writing the above thread, I drew extensively on the work of Ilya Shapiro. Ilya is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is also a senior fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. @ishapiro.

The details of SCOTUS rulings:

Won Lost Win Rate
Obama 79 96 45%
G.W. Bush 89 59 60%
Bill Clinton 148 87 63%
G.H.W. Bush 91 39 70%
Reagan 260 89 75%
Carter 139 65 68%

Leaving aside Presidents, if you want to get a sense of which party has authoritarian tendencies, look no further for clues than the language used by Democrat drenched MSM. It is so innate they don't even notice it. Here's a snippet from MSM today. See how the mask slipped.

The details of SCOTUS rulings:

Won Lost Win Rate
Obama 79 96 45%
G.W. Bush 89 59 60%
Bill Clinton 148 87 63%
G.H.W. Bush 91 39 70%
Reagan 260 89 75%
Carter 139 65 68%