In one of his State of the Union speeches, Barack Obama criticized the Supreme Court for its 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case, which he said would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limits in our elections.” In one of his addresses, Joe Biden critiqued the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Heading into Donald Trump’s latest congressional appearance on Tuesday night, he has already thoroughly lashed out at Friday’s tariffs ruling against him and — in dehumanizing terms — the justices behind it. Now, just a few days after the decision, he’ll come face to face with whichever justices decide to show up to the House chamber of the Capitol.
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There has long been an awkwardness to the affair, with the nominally apolitical justices sitting through a decidedly political speech and the accompanying cheers and jeers from either side of the aisle.
“To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I’m not sure why we’re there,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in 2010, after Obama’s remarks on Citizens United.
Along with Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts attended Trump’s joint address to Congress last year, during which the president was in a more grateful mood toward the chief justice and the high court, which had granted him broad criminal immunity and cleared the way for his latest presidential run despite the Jan. 6 insurrection. Different combinations of justices have attended over the years.
Roberts authored the tariffs ruling, joined in the 6-3 bottom line by Trump appointees Barrett and Justice Neil Gorusch, as well as the court’s three Democratic appointees: Kagan and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. On Friday, while calling the justices in the majority cowards, disgraces, traitors and embarrassments to their families, the president praised Kavanaugh, as well as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who all dissented. He said the dissenters are “happily” invited to the State of the Union and that the justices in the majority are “barely” invited and he “couldn’t care less if they come.”
The court is set to issue more opinions this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday. It doesn’t announce what’s coming ahead of time, and whatever comes seems unlikely to fully overshadow the tariffs decision, but any Trump-friendly rulings on Tuesday morning would add another layer to the evening’s dynamic. Likewise, the president on Tuesday night could disparage justices who then issue a decision he might like in another case on Wednesday morning.
And while Kavanaugh has attended in recent years, the two justices who joined his tariffs dissent have not. Alito hasn’t shown up since the Citizens United year, when he was seen mouthing “not true” in response to Obama’s characterization of the ruling. A 2024 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that aired Alito’s dim view of the event — “We sit there like potted plants,” he said — noted that Thomas last went in 2006. Thomas said in 2010 that he doesn’t go “because it has become so partisan.”
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