"Editor's note: Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger professor of legal history at Northwestern University School of Law and a professor of business law at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He signed two of the amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court challenging the health care law.
(CNN) -- In what must be the most extraordinary statement of his presidency, Barack Obama on Monday blasted the possibility that the United States Supreme Court might overturn the Affordable Care Act. Obama said the court would take an "unprecedented, extraordinary step" if it overturns the law, because it was passed by "a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."
Setting aside the point that the ACA did not pass with an overwhelming majority, but by a party-line vote in the Senate and seven votes in the House, and without the support of a single member of the Republican Party, the most astonishing thing about Obama's diatribe was the fundamental misunderstanding of our constitutional tradition it revealed.
Since 1788, in the famous defense of the Constitution set forth by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, it has been understood that it is the task of the Supreme Court to rein in majoritarian legislatures when they go beyond what the Constitution permits.
This is not, as Obama implies, judicial activism, or political activity on the part of the justices. This is simply, as Hamilton explained, fidelity to the Constitution itself, fidelity to the highest expression of "We the People of the United States," the body whose representatives ratified that Constitution."
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