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Alito v. Obama

Reactions split on Obama's remark, Alito's response at State of the Union

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 29, 2010

 

President Obama called out the Supreme Court. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. winced at the accusation and muttered, "Not true." And then official Washington and the legal community went to the tape, and examined it frame by frame.

What they saw -- either a president gratuitously criticizing the silent black-robed justices sitting in front of him or a conservative jurist injudiciously reacting to a man who had voted against his confirmation -- depended on from where they started.

"Rude," Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said of the president. "Inappropriate" was the verdict on Alito from Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.).

And legal experts said they had never seen anything quite like it, a rare and unvarnished showdown between two political branches during what is usually the careful choreography of the State of the Union address.

"I can't ever recall a president taking a swipe at the Supreme Court like that," said Lucas A. Powe Jr., a Supreme Court expert at the University of Texas law school. The closest precedent most could find was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's criticism of the court in his 1937 address to Congress.

More . . .

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