Never Make A Kennedy Angry

They may just decide to never leave:

Justice Kennedy, who turns 74 this month, has told relatives and friends he plans to stay on the high court for at least three more years – through the end of Obama’s first term, sources said.

That means Kennedy will be around to provide a fifth vote for the court’s conservative bloc through the 2012 presidential election. If Obama loses, Kennedy could retire and expect a Republican President to choose a conservative justice.

Kennedy, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has been on the court 22 years. He has become a bit of a political nemesis at the White House for his increasing tendency to side with the court’s four rock-ribbed conservative justices.

In fact, as the New York Daily News implies, Kennedy may have made that decision after this year’s State of the Union address:

Without naming Kennedy, Obama was unusually critical of his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, handed down last January. That 5-4 decision struck down limits on contributions to political campaigns as an abridgement of free speech.

Obama called the ruling “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power … in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

He was so angry that he took the unusual step of blasting the decision in his January 27 State of the Union address, with Kennedy and five other justices looking on.

I'm actually more than a little baffled as to why SCOTUS Justices can't fire back at such political broadsides.  Not in the Joe Wilson sense - which Justice Alito didn't come close to imitating - but in subsequent speeches and interviews.

So are as I know, they can.  They just don't.  And THAT reason is a no brainer - because previous presidents never went out of their way to launch a sneering, in-your-face ideological attack on what is supposed to be the least political of the three branches during a SOTU show that said broadside turned into a hooting, jeering, boorish, banana republicanesque partisan lynching.  But then Red Barry did say he wasn't going to be like any of his predecessors; that's one promise he's definitely kept.

And that has a definitive bright side in that it revealed for all the world to see how political B.O. takes the SCOTUS to be (which explains why he's staffing it incompetent, neophyte radicals like he is the Executive Branch, of which he expects Olympus to be a wholly owned extension).

Well guess what, Barry?  Justice Kennedy was paying attention.  Thanks to your twin extended middle fingers at the author of the decision that was landmark in its restoration of First Amendment rights FOR EVERYBODY, not just the Obamunist Left, what was a 4-4-1 High Court split is apt to be more solidly 5-4 against you.  And you may not get any more opportunties to oligarchize Olympus into your back pocket.

Remember your Newton, Lucifer: If you scream "SCREW YOU!" at your enemy, he's apt to do his best to screw you right back.  In this case, by utilizing the lifetime appointment that, despite your best efforts, you'll never have.