What if Bush Had Done It?
Our friend the Washington Insider called to ask: had any president before ever denounced the Supreme Court to their own faces in the way that Barack Obama just did?
I have not yet looked through them all, but a first scan can find no precedent.
Even Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, on the eve of pushing his court-packing plan, was more circumspect.
The judicial branch also is asked by the people to do its part in making democracy successful. We do not ask the courts to call nonexistent powers into being, but we have a right to expect that conceded powers or those legitimately implied shall be made effective instruments for the common good.
The process of our democracy must not be imperiled by the denial of essential powers of free government.
The next year, 1938, Roosevelt was more delicate still.
The Supreme Court delivered a stinging rejection to the Truman administration in the steel seizure case of 1952. Truman had nothing to say about it in his 1953 SOTU.
It looks like here's another first for Obama: the first president to criticize a specific court decision in a State of the Union address - and certainly to do so in terms that, if not outright untruthful, were certainly misleading.