Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley picked a Twitter fight with the White House over the weekend, calling the president “stupid” in a grammatically challenged tweet aimed at Obama‘s recent comments about his health care legislation.
“Constituents askd why i am not outraged at PresO attack on supreme court independence,” the GOP Senator wrote, apparently abbreviating his words to fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit. “Bcause Am ppl r not stupid as this x prof of con law.”
Grassley’s criticism of Obama came after the president, a former Constitutional law professor, said he didn’t believe the Supreme Court would take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step” of actually overturning the health care law.
Former White House adviser David Axelrod, who is working on Obama’s re-election campaign, mocked the Senator in a tweet of his own.
“Heads up, Sen. Grassley,” Axelrod countered. “I think a 6-year-old hijacked your account and is sending out foolish Tweets just to embarrass you!”
Though Grassley has been the victim of Twitter hackers before, aides said Sunday the tweet was his own.
“The Tweet is Sen. Grassley’s,” the Senator’s staffers told NBC. “He is saying that it doesn’t speak well of any constitutional law professor to not understand Marbury v. Madison. The people understand the independence of the judiciary. So he thinks most Americans are smarter on the constitution.”
Both Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder were forced to clarify the president’s statement after critics pounced, accusing him of pressuring the court.
Holder noted on Thursday that while the justices’ power to review bills is “beyond dispute,” Obama was right in saying the Supreme Court typically “accords great weight to the decisions of Congress” and “accords particular deference” to legislative decisions that have broad economic implications.
Meanwhile, the judges continue to deliberate.
“We don’t respond to criticism,” Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at the University of Southern Mississippi on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. “Judges use what’s known as the rope-a-dope trick. It’s judicial tradition.”
