"If that were even close to being true, then why are you suing me?"
Did you hear the news that the United States Supreme Court has now ruled 13 times that President Obama's executive orders are unconstitutional? And not only that, but did you hear the news that these 13 rulings were all unanimous, with even President Obama's own appointees ruling against his dictatorial abuse of power?
If you didn't know that, then you must not listen to Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer very much then, because he says:
[I]n the last three years alone, 13 times, the Supreme Court, unanimously, 9-0, including all of the president’s liberal picks, have struck down the president’s executive orders.
It's never fun to be the last person in on a secret, but if you're like me and you had never heard that particular fact before, you're going to be happy about the ending to this story, because as Steve Benen
writes, this particular "fact" is not only false, it's not even close to being true. Its only tenuous connection to reality is that in 13 cases, Obama administration's position hasn't prevailed. As Benen puts it, Spicer's statement is...
...demonstrably ridiculous in ways that are nothing short of amazing.
If Spicer were close to being right, it wouldn’t much matter. If, say, the Supreme Court had struck down the president’s executive orders 11 times, it’d be close enough. Or if there were 13 rulings, but not all of them were unanimous, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.
But the actual number of instances in which the Supreme Court struck down the president’s executive orders is zero. The RNC’s communications director said it was 13, but he was off by 13.
Only one of those 13 cases even had anything to do with the president's exercise of executive power—the case over recess appointments. (Yeah, the one that Iowa GOP Senate nominee Joni Ernst
said should lead to Obama's impeachment.)
The thing about this that I find really striking is that I actually suspect Spicer wasn't lying—I suspect he really believed that what he said was true. That's not an excuse, mind you, it's an indictment, because believing what he said requires a mixture of Obama hatred and absolute idiocy that should disqualify someone from being the spokesperson for a national party.