Alito’s Face
Fair Courts E-lert
Bibliographic Info:
Author: Jeffrey Toobin
Source: The New Yorker
Date: 1/28/2010
The press has been abuzz over a spat between the President and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, on display last week during President Obama’s State of the Union address. Referring to Citizens United, the President criticized the Court for “revers[ing] a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests . . . to spend without limit in our elections.” As cameras panned to the justices in attendance, Alito could be seen shaking his head and mouthing the words “Not true.” “The larger issue raised by Alito’s atypical reaction goes to the place of the Court in American life,” writes Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker. “The Justices have strong political views, which have powerful impacts on how they do their jobs. Alito performed the public service of making this point clearer for a national audience.” At The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen writes that Obama’s “welcome readiness to attack the Court’s conservative majority for its judicial activism” may well temper the Court’s activism in the future. “It takes only a few high-profile presidential attacks to tar a Court as activist in the eyes of history. During the 1930s, the Supreme Court upheld a great deal of FDR’s economic recovery program, but the New Deal Court is remembered today as a group of unprincipled activists because of just a handful of high profile decisions that FDR prominently attacked.”
See also Jeffrey Rosen, Obama’s War with the Court Just Escalated, The New Republic, January 27, 2010.