In a speech before the Catholic Health Association Tuesday, Barack Obama bent the narrative of history to fit his will. In the days leading up to when the Supreme Court will decide whether it’s legal for the federal government to provide subsidies for health insurance not purchased on a state exchange, Obama is leveraging every rhetorical trick, trying to convince the Court to allow him to rewrite ObamaCare. On Monday, he told a group of reporters that SCOTUS shouldn’t have taken up King v. Burwell. But since it has, he said, “This should be an easy case” because legal scholars side with his interpretation.

The next day, Obama ramped up his attack on the impartiality of the Supreme Court when he used the Bully Pulpit to defend ObamaCare using religious and historical rhetoric, evoking the names of Teddy Roosevelt and Ted Kennedy. In his speech at the Catholic conference, Obama said, “The rugged individualism that defines America has always been bound by a shared set of values, an enduring sense that we’re in this together, that America is not a place where we simply turn away from the sick, or turn our backs on the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. It is a place sustained by the idea: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper — that we have an obligation to put ourselves in our neighbor’s shoes and see each other’s common humanity.” What Obama left out: This law he says is couched in historical precedent was rammed through Congress with a midnight, party-line vote, and now he’s rewriting it to suit his purposes. As for values, the freedom from coercion is a pretty strong American value, running through the nation since the rebellion against the Stamp Act. More…