So, How Long Till SCOTUS Demands A Cable News Show?

Fallout

by Glynnis MacNicol | 9:24 am, January 29th, 2010

» 10 comments

When you’re Joe Wilson and you heckle the President you are required to quickly make an apology before turning around and stuffing your re-election coffer with all the monies pouring in from voters who consider you a hero. When you are a Supreme Court justice and you quietly mouth back to a President who has just called you out during his first official State of the Union address the result is a lot of intellectual heavy weights using to oped pages to wrestle over the role of the court (does everybody now want to be a cable news talking head at heart? and the appropriateness of the President challenging (threatening) it to their faces in one-sided public forum.

Glenn Greewald of Salon has been especially vocal on what he considers an egregious error on Justice Alito’s part (though technically Alito may have been correct) , an act that further marks the decline of the Supreme Court, which began with Bush v. Gore.

Justice Alito’s flamboyantly insinuating himself into a pure political event, in a highly politicized manner, will only hasten that decline. On a night when both tradition and the Court’s role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive, he instead turned himself into a partisan sideshow — a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President — with Republicans predictably defending him and Democrats doing the opposite. Alito is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats, which is exactly the role a Supreme Court Justice should not occupy.

Alito’s behavior meanwhile has opened the floodgates for Democratic complaints that both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts (both Bush 43 nominees) misled Congress during their confirmation hearings when they “represented themselves as jurists who would respect precedent.”

Meanwhile Dahlia Lithwick says cool it. Alito’s human:

[T]here was also absolutely nothing inappropriate about the justice’s reaction to him. Both the president and the justices are political actors, and all are entitled to screw up their faces and grumble in public as they see fit.

And then there’s this from George Will which doesn’t actually address the SCOTUS moment per se, but instead articulates what I think Sarah Palin (also Glenn Beck last night) was trying to get at when they complained of the president’s lecturing:

Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of . . . everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state….Obama’s leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic — yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain.

barack obama, Dahlia Lithwick, George Will, John Roberts, Justice Alito, SCOTUS, SOTU

roxsteady

There’s one more side that you missed. Last night, Rachel Maddow unearthed a clip of then, Senator Obama during Alito’s confirmation hearings. In the clip Obama basically outlined why he was voting against Alito and while I can’t remember the exact words, it was essentially all of his decisions were for big corporations and against the little guy. It was erie! Hopefully you can find this clip. I’ll search for it too.
Facebook User

If Obama misrepresented the Supreme Court ruling and what it says about contributions from international companies (his ‘floodgates’ comment), then Alito is quite within his right to do what he did. He was not demonstrably disruptive and, if not for a camera pointing his way at that exact moment, I wouldn’t even be writing this comment because no one would have known. On the face of it, Obama deserves to be challenged when stating obvious untruths.
http://www.nukethefridge.com MartiniShark

Glen Greewald needs to get a grip.

Justice Alito’s flamboyantly insinuating himself into a pure political event. . . Shaking a head back-and-forth is “flamboyant?” Talk about melodramatic.

. . . in a highly politicized manner. . . And how would he describe the President’s delivery, which has been shown by many to be inaccurate?

On a night when both tradition and the Court’s role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive. . . Which was in stark contrast to the President using that forum to not only condemn the decision but to provoke wild applause from his sychophants in the chambers. and he did so knowing the judges would not react in kind.

— a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President. And there it is, another lackey getting upset that the President might have to suffer a critical summation of his actions. Exactly how delicate is this President that he cannot tolerate the smallest bit of criticism?! “Oh dear, a judge shook his head, the poor dear!” So it was fine that Obama could spout his partisan, and incorrect, rhetoric but Alito shaking his head was crossing the line of decency. Please. . .
http://www.uselessbeauty.com Vidiot

I’m with Jeffrey Toobin on this one. Neither Alito nor Obama were out of line.
TfT

Obama was wrong, he should admit he was wrong. Alito had every right to correct him because Obama was wrong.
apparently

If the Supreme Court Justices are required to maintain a slient decorum in public, then Obama’s remarks should have been made privately and not during the SOTUS and on national television. If Obama doesn’t want Joe Wilsons, then he should behave a little more appropriately himself.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the Justices must sit on their hands and they are members of a co-equal branch of government. Personally, I have no problem with Justice Alito’s action and if they’d like to open the court to cameras, where they can get their own C-SPAN, I say great.

Otherwise in the meantime, there’s been court shows on all the various news channels and there used to be CourtTV. I’d prefer a 24/7 SCOTUS channel, though I’d accept “BookNotes” in the middle of the night or on weekends, but basically, I’ll take what we can get.
J Baustian

Justice Alito responded naturally when the president made an intentionally false statement about the recent Supreme Court decision — intentionally because the error was in the written text of the speech, not just something said in the spur of the moment.

The other justices, regardless whether they supported the decision or dissented, also know that the president lied. I’m not sure how they were able to keep from making at least some facial expressions or other gestures.
TfT

Where is the outrage? Obama lied in his SOTU. I recall the 16 words that were true but the left claimed them to be a lie, and the media went beserk. Why isn’t there similar outrage about the lie that Obama made in his SOTU? (I know, I know, he is a dem, dems can lie without consequence to them).
voluble

If Obama does not want to be called out about being a liar or a fool the simplest solution is for him to stop lying and to think about what he says before he says it. It is much simpler than requiring everyone else to pretend otherwise and deny reality.

If there is a subject about which Obama is not wholly ignorant it has yet be found nearly a full year into his presidency. His defining characteristic seems to be that he is a lazy and shallow thinker. He conflates the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution and he misunderstands a Supreme Court decision in its entirety in one paragraph. Add to that the hypocrisy of incorrectly inveighing against against foreign corporations being able to donate under the recent Supreme Court decision while having taken large amounts of money from foreign sources via credit card in the last election and you have the intellectual and moral train wreck that is the Obama administration in a nutshell.

Everyone pats him on the head after he makes a fool of himself in this manner and says how bright he is but we have yet to see any evidence of this claim.