The Man Who Fell to Earth

Forty-five years ago this past Monday a Russian cosmonaut was launched into space. No, it was not Yuri Gagarin, the first man to make it into space for one orbit on April 12, 1961 – six years earlier. The man I am referring to was Vladimir Komarov. Never heard of him? Little wonder. Soviet secrecy about its space program – especially the disasters – made sure of that. The little we know of Komarov and his fateful flight on April 23, 1967 was mentioned in a book published last April entitled Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by authors Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony.

The authors claim they were able to learn what they published during a short period of "expressive freedom" while they were in Russia and the old security system was rendered ineffective by the collapse of the Soviet security system. Because of this, they were able to speak with many of the people who were eye witnesses to the flight operations of Soyuz 1, the designation of Komarov’s capsule, and its failure to return to earth safely. The reason that Komarov’s story is inside of a story about Yuri Gagarin is that Gagarin was the back-up pilot for the flight if for any reason Komarov couldn’t or wouldn’t fly it. As we shall see, he had ample reason to refuse the flight, but Gagarin was his friend and if one of them was to die, the authors claim, Komarov decided it should be him.

The early spacecraft designs for both the Russians and Americans were primitive. The pilot was more a passenger than a controller of the vehicle. About all he could do was adjust the attitude of the craft during flight with small bursts of rocket thrusts. John Glenn had to do some "steering" during his flight when minor problems developed in his Mercury capsule. The big difference in the Mercury and Soviet Vostok spacecraft was Mercury’s pilot stayed on board and the capsule parachuted into the sea for a relatively soft landing, whereas, the Vostok reentry was slowed by a single parachute and the pilot ejected in the last phase of the flight to land on the ground by means of his personal parachute.

As America and the Soviet competed to be first in a moon landing, the Kremlin became less concerned with safety than it was with winning. Americans Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White had died in an interior fire aboard the Apollo command module during a test drill four months before Komarov’s death. Other American astronauts would die in later flights in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. Space flight could be made safe but never risk-free.

The Soviet Soyuz program was the Soviet answer to advances we made in our Gemini earth orbit program. Soyuz was a three-man craft like Apollo, and like Apollo, it was the vehicle planned to take a Russian crew to the moon. Unlike earlier Soviet space craft, Soyuz could be maneuvered in space, which it would be required to do to dock up with the "mother ship" after an ascent from the lunar surface.

As a young engineer with Scientific-Atlanta in the 1960s, I was the program manager for the construction of the Lunar Lander and Rendezvous antenna boresight test facility in Houston which my company built. Our instrumentation and capsule positioning gantry calibrated the onboard rendezvous radar system which allowed the lunar ascent module to find and dock up with the Apollo command module. The command module carried three men to and from the moon, two of whom descended to the surface in the lunar excursion module. To return, the lower portion of the excursion module served as a launch pad and was left behind. Due to the minimal gravity of the moon and the lighter payload, the ignition to insert the ascent module into lunar orbit did not require a lot of lifting power. The ascent module "chased" the command module in lunar orbit, using its rendezvous radar system to find it, and upon "catching" it, both the command module pilot and ascent module pilot maneuvered to hook up much like a tanker refuels planes in flight. Hooked and locked, the two-man lunar crew scrambled aboard the command module for the return trip, jettisoning the no-longer-needed ascent module.

The propulsion for the trip home was provided by the service module, which would be jettisoned just before entering earth’s atmosphere. This is the tricky phase in getting home safely. The entry angle had to be correct, because too shallow an angle would have caused the command module to skip along the outer fringe of atmosphere and land far away from the planned touchdown. The Apollo command module was conically shaped with a slightly rounded bottom to act as its heat shield. The point of the cone was aft during reentry. As the command module continued through the denser regions of the atmosphere, the heat shield would begin to burn away by design, giving the appearance that the module was on fire. The denser atmosphere would also slow the descent. At an altitude of 25,000 feet, drogue parachutes were shot out of the aft end, and at 10,000 feet, the drogues were jettisoned and three main descent parachutes were shot out to lower the module to the ocean’s surface.

The Soyuz module had a bell shape and a flat bottom giving it less lift than Apollo. Its landings were land-based, rather than at sea, and a single descent parachute was deployed. The Russian cosmonauts would remain onboard unlike the Vostok capsule. As the craft neared the earth’s surface, retrorockets would be ignited to provide a soft landing, working much like the descent rockets on the Apollo lunar excursion module. A lunar descent, however, is done in 1/6^th the gravity of an earth descent. Less power was needed and less could go wrong.

During the early stages of the Soyuz program, two important developments occurred which affected the integrity of the program. One was the untimely death of the Soviet space program director, Sergei Korolev. He had multiple health complications but entered the hospital in January 1966 supposedly for routine surgery to remove an intestinal polyp. He never recovered. The official story associated his death was complications in the removal of a cancerous tumor. The unofficial story is that he bled to death in a botched hemorrhoidectomy. His successor, Vasiliy Mishin, was a competent technocrat but no intellectual equal to Korolev. All of the political pressure to beat the Americans in the space race fell on Mishin with little warning or preparation.

The second development was the rise to power of Leonid Brezhnev. Although he was tacitly loyal to his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev became involved in a 1963 plot to remove Khrushchev from power, allowing him to play a leading role in government. Brezhnev later succeeded in overthrowing the power structure and outmaneuvered all other contenders who threatened his ascendency. Like his predecessor Khrushchev, Brezhnev was high on symbolism, and in heady days of the 1960s, the Soviet space program seemed well ahead of the American program. Its mission launches were often scheduled to coincide with important dates in Soviet history.

As the 50^th anniversary of the Russian Revolution drew near in April 1967, Brezhnev allegedly made clear that he wanted to stage a space spectacular. The plan was to launch two spacecraft. The first would carry a single pilot; the second would launch the following day carrying two pilots. They would rendezvous in space and the pilot of the first craft would replace one of the pilots of the second craft, and the replaced pilot would transfer to the first craft. These were unnecessary risks to take early in the age of space with buggy spacecraft whose completion for the mission had been rushed – all to put on a show.

Preparations for this stunt were kept highly secret and it wasn’t until April 20, 1967 that the pilot and back-up pilot for the first launch were named – Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin respectively. The launch date was set for April 23.

The mission continued shrouded in secrecy, but observant participants noticed that for the first time a launch vehicle carried a number, in this case Soyuz 1, implying that there might also be at least a Soyuz 2 if not subsequent craft in the fleet.

The Soyuz spacecraft was not ready for manned flight. Unmanned flights had developed problems that would have killed the pilot. A rational plan would have been to continue unmanned flights until all of the bugs were worked out before manned space flights. But Brezhnev wanted Russians back in space to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system, not only to its own people, but also to the world.

Mishin and Komarov were pressured to meet the deadline with one Soviet official going so far as to threaten to strip Komarov of his colonel’s rank and his military honors if he refused. In those days, rank had its privileges – largely economic ones in a poor country, which Russia was.

A group of cosmonauts and engineers inspected the Soyuz and compiled a list of 203 flaws that affected the spacecraft’s flightworthiness. But the Soviet system had a tendency to punish the bearer of bad news, so getting this list into the hands of a trustworthy messenger who would assure that it made its way up the line of authority to the desk of someone who could halt this suicidal mission was a challenge.

Finally, a close friend of Yuri Gagarin, Venyamin Russayev, a KGB agent, was identified as a possible candidate. He had dined with Komarov and his wife one evening and learned the seriousness of the Soyuz launch. As Komarov walked Russayev to the door to leave, he told him, "I’m not going to make it back from this flight." Russayev asked why he didn’t refuse the assignment, and Komarov said, "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead. That's Yura, (i.e. Gagarin, Komarov’s dearest friend) and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears, according to the book’s authors. Russayev agreed to be the courier.

Russayev passed the memo detailing the flaws in Soyuz up the line in hopes that it would reach Brezhnev. It didn’t. Instead Russayev was demoted and reassigned to a job that prevented any interaction with the space program. The same fate befell everyone who read the memo.

Komarov’s Soyuz 1 lifted off at 3:35a in the morning of April 23. Soyuz 2 stood ready to launch the following morning. After the prescribed nine minutes into the flight, the spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle and was inserted into earth orbit. Things began to go wrong almost immediately. One of the solar panels did not deploy, cutting in half the power available for recharging the onboard batteries. That solar panel obstructed the star and sun sensors needed to maintain stable attitude. This prevented aligning the craft for engine firing in preparation for reentry. Manual deployment of the solar panel, including kicking the side of the craft on which the panel was stowed failed to dislodge it. A back-up telemetry antenna also did not deploy.

With power failing, it became obvious to the mission controllers that they had to get Komarov home while they still had the electricity to do it. The Soyuz 2 launch was scrubbed. Ground controllers developed a plan to bring Komarov down on the 17^th orbit but planned back-up options for orbits 18 and 19, which would still leave time before battery failure.

An order was sent up to reorient the craft on orbits 15 through 17 using a special engine onboard to do it. The engine failed. Komarov didn’t have time to attempt manual reentry until orbit 19. But to do a manual reentry, he had to be able to see the sun through the device blocked by the solar panel, and to land at the designated area, he had to fire the retrorockets on the night side of the earth. The system failures forced Komarov to extemporize a procedure for orienting the craft on earth’s daylight side and maintain attitude through earth’s night side using a gyro platform as a reference while he fired the reentry rockets.

About 6:20a, Komarov was to burn his retro engines for 150 seconds and manually maintain attitude. He started the retro burn but a computer failure shut off the engines prematurely. Ground controllers confirmed that the descent module had separated from the instrument module but the craft would land off target. That was the least of Komarov’s problems.

The solar panel that failed to deploy made the spacecraft asymmetrical and shifted the center of gravity as the craft reentered earth’s atmosphere. This caused the Soyuz to start spinning – a condition that worsened as atmospheric density increased. Without the ability to control attitude, Komarov couldn’t orient the craft to keep the heat shield pointed down in the direction of the reentry, and he couldn’t take advantage of the craft’s aerodynamic qualities to generate lift. At the prescribed altitude, the drogue parachute failed to deploy, which meant there was nothing to pull out the main parachute from its canister. Soyuz was simply falling as a meteor would, which is what it had become.

Eavesdroppers at the American National Security Agency were monitoring the mission and were listening in on the final moments of the descent. A Russian official talking to Komarov was crying, telling him he was a national hero. His wife spoke to him about putting his personal affairs in order and about their children before saying goodbye. Toward the end of the NSA tape Komarov’s voice began to show signs of panic, saying "the parachute is wrong" and "heat is rising in the capsule." The final transmission consisted of yells of rage and frustration that he had been sent on a mission of death.

Soyuz 1 hit the ground at full speed. The capsule was flattened and the impact set off the retrorockets that were to slow the descent, causing the wreckage to catch fire. Helicopter rescue crews got to the site to save Komarov, but their extinguishers were ineffective in putting out the fire. It was only extinguished with shovels and dirt. When they were able to clear away the dirt and wreckage, Komarov’s charred remains were in the center seat of the three-man Soyuz 1.

Remarkably, Komarov was given an open-casket state funeral, which for those with stomach for it can be viewed here. The official version of his demise was filled with lies. Moreover, a number of critics with space race expertise have disputed some of the facts presented by the authors of Starman. Notwithstanding the expertise of those critics, it seems to me that a fraud of these proportions is unlikely. What purpose would it have served? Under the present regime, an accurate version of the incident will likely never be known until Russia becomes a very different, open society.

As things turned out Vladimir Komarov’s choice to sacrifice his life was in vain. Yuri Gagarin and a flight instructor died a year later in a 1968 MIG crash. The Americans walked on the moon the following year.

A Titanic Failure

On its maiden voyage, the RMS Titanic carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, over a thousand immigrants, and a crew of about 900. One hundred years ago this past Sunday the ship broke apart and sank in the North Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. Over two-thirds of the people on board were lost – about 1,500 out of 2,200. Its designers and owners called Titanic “unsinkable.” Today its remains are under 12,500 feet of water.

The fateful and only voyage of Titanic has been the subject of about 200 books, seven major motion pictures, two Broadway plays, and seven artifact exhibitions.

For its day, the ship was a high-tech marvel. It was just short of nine football fields in length, about a football field in width, and the top of its funnels (stacks) was about the height of a 17-story building above the keel. Its 90-foot wide control panel centralized the management of all lighting, fans, generators, and condensers that turned steam into water for the boilers, and desalinized sea water into drinking water. All of the on-board clocks could be reset by the Captain on the bridge as the ship passed from one time zone into another. Powered by three 40-foot high steam engines with four 9-foot diameter pistons, which consumed 600 tons of coal per hour, Titanic’s three propeller screws could push the ship at a top speed of 24 knots (28 mph).

A trip from England to America could be made in five days. For the 325 first-class passengers, it was sheer luxury. They brought their pets and servants. The evening meal was signaled by bugle, whereupon the pampered travelers descended the grand staircase in white tie, gloves, and gowns to enjoy an 11-course meal. There were 22,000 bottles of wine, beer, and liquor on board. The cost of a one-way first class promenade suite was $4,350 – about $105,000 in 2012 dollars. But even third-class accommodations were comfortable and the food was good and plentiful – often better living conditions than those passengers had at home.

There were four elevators, nine decks, and a few of the first class suites had telephones, although ship to shore calls were not possible. Communication from the ship depended on a wireless telegraph system which was state-of-the-art for its day. The transmitter’s antenna was strung between masts 250 feet above the ocean surface. Whereas most ships of the day could transmit Morse code 100 to 150 miles during the day, Titanic could transmit 500 miles during the day and 2,000 miles at night. Because of this capability, Titanic was able to communicate its distress call to every ship in the North Atlantic.

The novelty of the wireless system caused it to be overused by passengers in first-class and second-class accommodations. The night before the fateful collision, the transmitter had malfunctioned, and the time required getting it up and running again caused a backlog of messages. This backlog would contribute to Titanic’s undoing on the night of April 14, 1912 when the British ship Californian, steaming about 12 miles away, sent a wireless message to the Titanic’s Captain at 7:30p that “three large bergs” had been sighted. At 9:40p another message from the Mesaba was received by the Titanic wireless operator reporting, “Saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs. Also field ice." The wireless operator, Jack Phillips, never reported this message. He was too busy sending unimportant passenger messages.

Then at 10:30p the Californian again transmitted that it was halting until daybreak when its Captain would be able to see the ice field. The Californian was so close to Titanic that its transmitter power spilled over that message into Jack Phillips headphones, drowning out the outgoing message Phillips was sending. "Shut up! Shut up! I'm working Cape Race,” Phillips signaled the Californian’s operator, meaning he was working the relay station at Cape Race, Newfoundland. Rebuffed, the Californian’s operator went off duty, leaving the wireless unattended when disaster struck about an hour later.

The winter of 1911-1912 had been unusually warm, causing icebergs, ice chunks, and flat slabs to break off of Greenland’s glaciers. Some icebergs were floating mountains eight miles wide and 50 miles long. Although they were a menace, and ships had collided with them several times each year, no ships had gone down in the decade before Titanic. Two days into its voyage, Titanic had received a total of seven iceberg warnings. There was no moon on April 14 and sonar and radar were still far into the future. The Titanic was steaming just below top speed – about 24 mph – relying completely on the eyes of two men in the crow’s nest. With its speed and displacement, Titanic would have needed to spot an iceberg a mile distant in order to turn the massive ship enough to avoid the submerged part of an iceberg. Without a moon, such visibility was impossible Just after 11p, the Titanic’s Captain left the bridge for the chartroom and then his stateroom.

At 11:40p one of the lookouts spotted an iceberg and frantically phoned the bridge where First Officer Murdock was in command. Told there was an iceberg “right ahead,” he ordered the helm to come hard to port (left) and to reverse engines. Not only did it take about 30 seconds to reverse the screws, doing so made the rudder less maneuverable. Had Murdock maintained speed and come to port, it is possible that the iceberg could have been averted. As it turned out, the ship skidded down the side of the iceberg causing large chunks of ice to fall on the foredeck. Before the ship could be brought to a full stop, serious damage was done below the waterline where the submerged part of the compacted ice split several sections of the starboard side for a length of 300 feet popping rivets and opening the ship to sea water from the forepeak to the first boiler room.

Captain Smith was on the bridge almost immediately. Since this was the maiden voyage, representatives of the ship’s builder were on board. A quick examination revealed that six of the water tight compartments were taking water. If it had been five, the ship could have stayed afloat. The sixth spelled its doom. Already there was 14 feet of water in the forward compartments. The bulkheads that made the compartments “water tight” extended vertically from the keel to above the waterline but not all of the way to the main deck. Therefore, as the weight of incoming water caused the ship to “nose down” water would spill over the top of the bulkheads. As this happened the seventh compartment flooded and then the eighth and so on until the ship sank. After surveying the damage and making a few calculations, the builder’s chief engineer estimated Titanic would sink in 90 minutes – maybe two hours.

The ship’s crew got the bilge pumps going, but they could only pump out 1,700 tons of water per hour and the ship was taking on almost 9,000 tons per hour. But driving the bilge pumps at full speed might buy enough time to allow ships to come to Titanic’s rescue. The wireless operators began sending out frantic distress and flares were fired from the decks. The flares were seen by the bridge of the Californian, which was stopped on the eastern side of the ice pack – the same side as Titanic. Its wireless operator had gone to bed and there was no night operator. Its Captain was off the bridge and was not summoned.

Captain Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia was 58 miles south of the unfolding tragedy and steaming eastward when his wireless operator notified him of the distress message. He backtracked turning north, shutting off the heat and hot water in his ship in order to maximize engine efficiency and speed. Weaving its way through the southern fringe of the ice field, Carpathia would not arrive on the scene for four hours.

Aboard Titanic, Captain Smith may have wanted to avoid panic among the passengers by not announcing the ship’s situation, but his delay is formulating a plan to get the passengers off is inexplicable. He had 40 years of experience at sea, 27 of those in command. Someone of that experience would have organized his officers, given them orders, and personally supervised to assure that his orders were being implemented in this desperate situation. Yet, even though he had been told he had a maximum of two hours before the ship sank, forty minutes passed with nothing done to save the passengers. Perhaps it was because Smith knew there weren’t enough lifeboats for even half those aboard.

Steam was being released by the boiler crews to prevent their explosion when the cold sea water reached them. The steam was venting through the funnels, making conversation on the bridge almost impossible. Still, Second Officer Lighttoller, who would survive the disaster, yelled to Captain Smith, “Hadn't we better get the women and children into the boats, sir?” Smith nodded and said to “put the women and children in the boats and lower away.”

Lightoller took charge of boarding the lifeboats on the port side while First Officer Murdoch took the starboard side. However, each officer had a different understanding of the evacuation order. Lighttoller thought he had been ordered to board only women and children, whereas Murdoch allowed men to board if space was available. The boats would hold 68 people. Unfortunately, most left the ship only partly filled. Had all of the boats carried their capacity, an additional 500 people could have been saved.

One of the problems was the passengers themselves. Many had been in bed when told to go to the boat decks. Some refused. Others refused to leave the comfort and heat of the ship to get in the boats, believing that Titanic was unsinkable. Lifeboat drills had not been conducted, contributing to confusion. The crew wasn’t trained in emergency procedures – convinced as the ship’s Captain was that evacuation would be unnecessary for this ship.

At 45 minutes past midnight, the first lifeboat rowed away from Titanic on the starboard side with 28 passengers. Ten minutes later, the second boat rowed away on the port side. It also had only 28 passengers, among them Margret “unsinkable Molly” Brown.

A passenger who made it aboard a later lifeboat was stewardess Violet Jessop. Four years later, she would have to make a similar escape when she abandoned the sinking of Titanic’s sister ship, Britannic, during the First World War.

At this point, over an hour had passed since the collision and most of the people who had boarded into the boats were first and second class passengers. Many of the third class passengers failed to make it up to the boat decks. Those who did had the help of heroic stewards, some of whom went back several times to lead additional groups. Without the help of stewards, the maze of upper deck passageways was difficult to navigate by third class passengers who didn’t use them during the voyage. Consequently, the loss of life among the third class was higher than first and second class.

Latter day revisionist historians have tried to make the case that class distinction and discrimination deprived third class from the lifeboats as evidenced by the death rates. But US immigration law compelled the segregation and barrier control of incoming immigrants to prevent infectious diseases from being spread among other passengers. Moreover, steerage passengers had to disembark at Ellis Island. Compounding their fate, many third class passengers spoke no English and could neither understand nor follow directions. Proof of that as an explanation for the high death rate among third class is the fact that many English-speaking Irish survived.

Some couples refused to be separated even if it meant dying together. Ida Straus, the wife of Macy's department store co-owner Isidor Straus, told her husband: "We have been living together for many years. Where you go, I go." They pulled a pair of deck chairs together and sat down to await their end. One of the wealthiest men aboard, industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, shed his life vest and sweater for a top hat and evening dress so that he would go down with the ship dressed like a gentleman.

The wealthiest man aboard Titanic, 47-year old John Jacob Astor IV, bade his 18-year old wife, Madeleine, goodbye and lighted a cigar as she rowed away. She would struggle with guilt, as many did, for having survived the disaster. After a few years, she renounced the Astor fortune and married a childhood sweetheart. Later divorcing him, she took up with an Italian boxer, who all too often thought she was a punching bag. Madeleine died almost 30 years after escaping the Titanic, still a relatively young woman. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, although friends believed it was an overdose of sleeping pills.

Life was not easy for many who made it safely off the sinking ship. They were afflicted with guilt and depression and at least ten committed suicide.

At 1:40a J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the ship line that owned Titanic, slipped aboard one of the last boats to leave the ship. After the disaster he resigned from the company and went into seclusion with his wife. But he found no peace because everyone who recognized him accused him of cowardice.

The last rocket flare was fired at 1:50a. The bow of the ship was below water. The bulkheads began to snap with the strain, and the front portion of the ship broke free at 2:20a just aft of the third funnel. As it did, the stern rose and then settled back, but not before pitching many of the passengers who had sought safety on the aft end into the sea.

The Carpathia arrived just after 4a, its Captain surveying the horror around him. As the sun rose, “all around us were dozens and dozens of icebergs, some comparatively close, others far away on the horizon, towering up like cathedral spires,” he said, convinced “that some other Hand than mine was on that helm during the night.”

Formal boards of inquiry were assembled on both sides of the Atlantic eager to fix blame. A major focus of investigation was the dearth of lifeboats, which in the years since the accident, many have blamed on penny-pinching owners of the Titanic. For the number of passengers it carried, 48 boats would have been needed.

But in his testimony to the British Board of Trade inquiry, Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, stated that he had proposed the need for more lifeboats to J. Bruce Ismay, the owner’s managing director. It was rejected, not for economic reasons, or because they would block the view of passengers on the promenade deck, as some historians have proposed, but because the British government regulated the required number of lifeboats. Government safety rules were based on displacement, not passengers. All vessels displacing more than 10,000 tons were required to carry 16 lifeboats. Titanic displaced over 45,000 tons and carried 20 plus four inflatable rafts. Of the 39 British vessels in service at the time which displaced more than 10,000 tons, 33 didn’t have enough lifeboats to save every passenger. As larger ships were built, the Board of Trade had simply failed to revise its lifeboat regulations during the preceding 20 years.

The problem with government regulations continues even today. Government is quick to pass new regulations and laws but fails to keep those that are on the books.relevant with the demands of the day. Look at the laws and regulations we have. They are a crazy quilt of patch jobs because politicians get reelected for passing new laws and regulations, not for revising those in existence. Left alone, most businesses would manage their risk exposure to avoid lawsuits for failing to do so. But as every business owner or senior management team learns, it is expected to comply with the regulations and the laws – not with the objective for their existence.

One would be hard pressed to show any thing which has gotten better when government took over the reins of managing it. The tragic loss of life in the Titanic accident is an example.

The Pulpit Bully

In the tumultuous election of 1800, John Adams was denied a second term by the election of Thomas Jefferson, our third president. On his way out of the White House, Adams made a number of “midnight” appointments, among them William Marbury to be Justice of the Peace of the (Washington) District of Columbia. His commission was not delivered by the incoming President’s Secretary of State, James Madison.

Marbury filed a writ of mandamus with the Supreme Court in 1803 petitioning it to compel Madison to deliver the commission. Ironically, the Court’s Chief Justice, John Marshall, had been the Secretary of State for Adams and had signed Marbury’s commission.

While the Court agreed with Marbury that he had a right to the commission and that he had a right to remedy under the law, the Court also decided that it had the authority under the Constitution to review the legality of the acts of Congress. (That would have produced a “Wow!” in 1803.) Given its newly asserted authority, the Court decided that Congress could not expand the role of the Court beyond the role enumerated in Article III of the Constitution and therefore the Judiciary Act of 1789 under which Marbury brought his claim was unconstitutional. Marbury’s claim was denied.

Marbury v. Madison was a landmark case which established the right of the Court to judicially review the acts of a co-equal branch of government, the Congress, to assure that its laws conformed to the Constitution. Constraining the power of Congress within its constitutional limits was a big deal in the years before the Civil War when states’ rights were jealously guarded against encroachment by the federal government. Regrettably, it’s no longer a big deal.

In the years since the Civil War, more and more power has shifted from the states to the central government. During the Roosevelt New Deal era in particular, the relevance of the Court and Constitution was severely tested as the Court voided law after law pushed through Congress by Roosevelt. Only because Roosevelt was committed to be President-for-Life, before Death carried him off in its loathsome bosom, was he able to appoint eight of the nine Supreme Court justices and stop their constitutional meddling in his legislative agenda.

With the election of Barack Obama we now have the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt, thankfully restrained by the 22^nd Amendment which passed after Roosevelt died, but nevertheless possessing the same disdain for the Court and Constitution. Last week, standing between Mexican President Felipe Calderón, chief exporter of aliens to the US, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose XL pipeline foolishly offered the US a way out of its oil shortage, the reincarnation of Roosevelt warned the Supreme Court not to mess with his ObamaCare law, whose constitutionality had just been argued before it. Speaking without benefit of teleprompter, Obama’s bizarre delivery sounded like words were dropping out of his brain directly on his tongue:

I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

And I – I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint; that, uhhh, an unelected, uhhh, group of – of people would somehow overturn, uhhh, a duly constituted and – and passed, uh, law. Uh, well, uh, uh, this is a good example. Uhh, and I’m pretty confident that this, – this court will recognize that, uh, and not take that step.

Apparently the smartest man ever to hold the office of the presidency – and former instructor in constitutional law – hasn’t heard of Marbury v. Madison which every first year law student is required to know. Moreover, he hasn’t gotten his facts right – which is not a first for Obama. The claim of “unprecedented” ignores precedent going back to Marbury in 1803. All of the laws that have been totally or partially overturned since then initially became law under “democratically elected” Congresses. Who else would have passed them into law? Undemocratically elected Congresses? Unelected Congresses? The Tooth Fairy maybe?

Memo to Obama: here’s a list of 158 acts of Congress that have been partially or fully voided by the Supreme Court.

The “strong majority” to which Obama referred was a whopping seven votes. Seven! That was in a House that has 435 members and a Democrat party that had a 75-seat majority at the time. Not a single Republican voted for passage, so it had no bipartisan support, but the votes against passage were bipartisan because 68 Democrats voted with the Republicans against passage.

In order to get the bill through the Senate, which had lost its bullet-proof protection against filibusters, procedural chicanery had to be employed by using the rules of reconciliation – something totally unintended to pass legislation that is this sweeping.

Moreover, the majority of the American people opposed ObamaCare when it passed, a majority has opposed it continuously since its passage, and 61% in the most recent polling want it repealed. What do you call a country in which the political elite passes laws opposed by the people, arguably violating our principal governing document in doing it? Isn’t that a dictatorship?

The entire premise of Obama’s ludicrous assertions of “unprecedented” and “strong majority” is swept away by the facts. What could the man have possibly been thinking? Roosevelt was far more popular when he (wrongfully) took on the Court. Obama’s approval percentages have been bouncing around in the 40s for two years.

The day after Obama threw down the gauntlet before the Supreme Court, however, a three-judge panel of the 5^th Court of Appeals, which was hearing another case related to ObamaCare, took up Obama’s dare. Judge Jerry Smith, one of the panel, held the benighted view that the Court, the Executive, and the Congress were co-equal branches of government as set forth in that antiquated document called the US Constitution.

The DOJ attorney arguing the government’s case, Dana Kaersvang, seemed taken aback when Judge Smith asked her to explain Obama’s critique of the Court’s hearings on "ObamaCare" and Smith asked if Obama’s remarks challenged the federal courts' power to strike down laws passed by Congress. According to those present, Judge Smith became “very stern,” saying it wasn’t clear whether this president believes such a right exists. In Smith’s words:

I’m referring to statements by the President in the past few days to the effect…that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed “unelected” judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed – he was referring, of course, to ObamaCare – what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.

That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review. And that’s not a small matter. So I want to be sure that you’re telling us that the Attorney General and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.

Smith told Kaersvang that she had 48 hours to submit to the Court a three-page, single-spaced paper defending judicial review and that the homework assignment should “make specific reference” to Obama’s statements. It sure seems like the Court was demanding the equivalent of writing 500 times “I will not misbehave in class.”

Kaersvang, no doubt shaken that never before had The Great One been challenged or held accountable for using the bully pulpit to be a pulpit bully, delivered her term paper on time. It appropriately acknowledged the precedent of Marbury v Madison and the Court’s authority. Unmentioned by Smith or Kaersvang, however, is the historic practice of professional courtesy which restrains people in political leadership from commenting on cases that are currently before the court – something Obama either doesn’t know or respect.

But then this president has never restrained himself from commenting on many things about which wiser men would keep their mouths shut.

You’ll recall Obama butting in, unburdened with any facts about the case, to make televised remarks about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama’s remarks included calling the Cambridge, Massachusetts police "stupid." The police were investigating a neighbor’s call concerning what appeared to be a break-in. Since the Gates home had been broken into before, it was logical to everyone but Obama that this might be another, especially since the person seeking to enter was throwing his weight against the door. It was nighttime, Gates was uncooperative, and he was warned that his behavior was interfering with a police investigation. Gates is also black. What Obama called stupid would be what the police would have been called if they had not intervened and allowed the house to be robbed.

Then there is the recent tragedy involving the death of Trayvon Martin. Although police work is a local responsibility, Obama again waded in sans the benefits of the facts. He had to be careful, he said, so as not to interfere with a DOJ investigation. Yet the DOJ comment was made before any facts were known that would justify a federal investigation in a local crime Obama continued:

It is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. … But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

The emerging picture of Trayvon Martin may cause Obama to recant his comments about having a son who looks like Martin or acted like Martin. The cheerful baby-faced photo of him that was initially released to the media was later exposed to have been taken five years earlier. Confronted with this fact, the family and media were compelled to produce a more recent photo which shows a more sullen Trayvon. His rap sheet wasn’t that of a guy who minded his own business. And, of course, a red-faced NBC was caught red-handed by Newsbusters, a conservative media monitoring group, for editing the tape to make the alleged shooter appear to be a racist.

Contrast Obama’s comments on the Gates and Martin cases with this one.

A year ago this month, two British students visiting America got lost and wandered into a black housing project in Sarasota, Florida. James Cooper, 25, and James Kouzaris, 24, had been drinking – too much I might add – when witnesses testified that Shawn Tyson, a 17-year old black teenager told them that he’d seen two white “crackers” walking around in the neighborhood and he intended to rob them.

Confronted by Tyson, Cooper and Kouzaris told him they were lost and had no money and they begged to be let go so they could return home. "Since you ain't got no money, then I have something for your ass," Tyson recounted to a witness, then added that he shot the men several times.

Their bodies were found shirtless on the street with pants pulled down to their thighs. Wallets for both men were in their pants and contained money. The pants of Cooper had a cell phone and camera in the pockets. In other words, this was no robbery. Authorities later found that Kouzaris' blood alcohol level was 0.243 and Cooper's was 0.214 – well past Florida's legal limit for intoxication when driving, which is 0.08. They were too drunk to know the danger they were in.

Tyson sat emotionless when he was sentenced to life in prison last month. Because he was under 18, he was not eligible for the death penalty but his sentence did not permit parole.

Obama, however, made no comment concerning the killing of Cooper and Kouzaris – no call for soul-searching, no charge of stupidity, no sympathy for the victims of this senselessness killing by a ruthless black teenager about the age of Trayvon Martin, no identification with the loss of the parents like, “If I had sons like Cooper and Kouzaris …”

A friend of the murdered students told the UK Daily Telegraph this:

We would like to publicly express our dissatisfaction at the lack of any public or private message of support or condolence from any American governing body or indeed, President Obama himself. Mr. Kouzaris [the father of one of the victims] has written to President Obama on three separate occasions and is yet to even receive the courtesy of a reply. It would perhaps appear that Mr. Obama sees no political value in facilitating such a request or that the lives of two British tourists are not worthy of ten minutes of his time.

Obama is what he seems to despise in American society. He castigates the richest 1% of Americans, yet he is among them. He ridicules the privileged, yet doors were opened for his career that gave him privileged access few others enjoy. He is quick to infer racism in an injustice, yet he behaves like a racist. He criticized Augusta National for excluding women, yet he plays any course he wishes notwithstanding its rules about membership. He mocks the lifestyle excesses of the rich and their corporate jets, yet during his first presidential term he and his wife have partied like Roman emperors (at taxpayer expense) and vacationed using the most expensive plane in the country.

Moreover, Obama seems never to have grasped that he was elected to govern with a light touch, not to rule or to reign. Americans do not need their lives managed – indeed micromanaged – by an insatiable central government that is consuming their wealth faster than they can create it. The Founders correctly understood that whatever problems citizens needed government to solve were best solved locally by the states – i.e. by the government closest to the people.

All of Obama’s blather about the conservative ideology of the Supreme Court which brought about last week’s confrontations ignores that four justices have always been viewed as a slam dunk to uphold ObamaCare. Kagan’s “questions” often sounded as if she was all too familiar with the government’s case. At times she even seemed to be arguing it rather than objectively listening to the evidence. Her prior service as Solicitor General before her appointment to the Court would have caused a better person to recuse herself. Instead her performance in the hearings revealed her to be a political hack rather than a judge of the law.

In most of the cases that come before it, this Court is only one justice away from concerning itself with the enumerated powers of Congress, and then only occasionally. If the Court upholds the argument that ObamaCare is constitutionally within the provisions of the Commerce Clause, there is no limit on what future Congresses can do to the American people and therefore, there is no longer a need for the Constitution that has served, albeit decreasingly, to restrain government for over 220 years.

I predict that ObamaCare will be upheld as constitutional, making the 2012 election the most important election in the history of the Republic. It will likely be our last chance to preserve what Catherine Drinker Bowen aptly called “the miracle at Philadelphia.”