Woo-hoo! Elena Kagan is everywhere! It’s Kaganfest 2010! She’s totally debatable as a Supreme Court nominee! She knows Eliot Spitzer! She’s better for a headline than Taylor Momsen! Everybody loves the Supreme Court! That is…now. But in 2008 during the campaign, no one cared.

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On Meet the Press yesterday, David Axlerod had this to say about Justice Alito’s SOTU response: “Well, I–look, we–in this weird political season, we’ve become accustomed to unusual outbursts in the chamber during these speeches, so.” Meaning that between the town halls and Joe Wilson, being heckled by a Supreme Court Justice is pretty much par for the course.

Fallout

This ain’t no Joe Wilson moment. When you’re a Supreme Court justice and you quietly mouth back to a President 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 SCOTUS (does everybody now want to be a cable news talking head at heart?) and the appropriateness of the President challenging (threatening?) them in a one-sided public forum.