An interesting take from TPM Reader SR …
Maybe it’s just because I’m a poli sci major turned lawyer, but that moment when he turned to the Supremes and took them directly to task forDred Scott IIthe Citizens United opinion, and then watching the majority look completely taken aback as the other branch of government stood up, looked at them and cheered actually stunned me a bit.
I know I’ve never seen anything like that happen in a SOTU and if anything like that has ever happened before in a SOTU or a joint session, I must have been hung over the day of the lecture in college. Even the fireside chat in which FDR unveiled his court packing scheme, as dripping with patrician condescension and barely concealed venom as it was, didn’t go second person and directly in their face the way Obama did tonight.The Supremes are used to wafting into the House in their black robes, sitting dispassionately through the speech and wafting ethereally out again on a cloud of apolitical rectitude. It’s like they forget they’re there because they’re one of the three branches. And I truly don’t think it ever occured to them that crassly injecting themselves into the sordid partisan fray of what they like to call “the political branches” with that catastrophic decision would cause the President to treat them like people who’d injected themselves into the sordid partisan fray. (And why should they? After all, they got away with Bush v. Gore with barely a dent in their credibility). I even thought I detected a bit of “told you” coming from the four in the minority.
I think we saw a bit of history made tonight, and no one noticed except the Supremes themselves.
