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The four conservative justices, and Kennedy who authored the opinion, will have, and I would love to see take, numerous opportunities to ream Obama and his hapless administration a new a$$whole in the upcoming months as revenge for his arrogant dissing of the court in front of a national audience. I'd love to see some really surprisingly conservative decision-making before the end of the current term. Hey! How about overturning Garcia and returning to League of Cities in ruling the the federal FLSA cannot constitutionally be applied to state and local government employees. This would result in hundreds of thousands of state and local government employees (90% of whom voted for the Obummer) suddenly finding themselves bereft of overtime benefits under federal law. Any FLSA cases on the court's docket this term? Such a decision would be well-founded on tenth amendment grounds anyway, and would have the added benefit of pi$$ing off Stevens, who was the justice who originally voted in the majority in League of Cities and eventually, nine years later, changed his feeble mind and decided that the commerce clause empowers the feds to dictate employment conditions for city custodians and firefighters in the Garcia decision.

My thoughts exactly. Not too bright a move to publicly rebuke a co-equal branch of the government, especially when that branch currently has a knife-edge majority leaning the other way politically. It would seem to me that Justice Kennedy, the swing vote on a lot of decisions, will be more likely to side with the conservative side of the court after Obama’s performance last night.

I wouldn’t even be surprised to see some 6-3 or 7-2 decisions if Justice Roberts manages to convince a couple of other justices that the disrespect for the Court shown by the President needs to be addressed. Maybe they were chuckling inside when Obama rebuked them for the decision, knowing they were on his side, or maybe they were distressed to see the Court singled out with such disrespect? Never know. One thing’s sure; none of them smiled.

As for Feingold, people are trying to get Tommy Thompson to run against him. He was Governor from 1987 to 2001 and was generally considered to have done a good job, which explains the 47/43 polling in his favor. If Feingold’s seat isn’t safe, the Dems are going to have a tough election season.