Last night, Joe Biden was 20 minutes late to his appointment with the American people. We have no idea where he was or what he was doing, nor did he apologize for keeping the nation waiting. And when he finally got going, he didn’t so much give a State of the Union speech as a campaign stump speech.

But it was what it was.

Rather than recap our decrepit president’s words in their entirety here, we wanted to focus on that portion of the speech that we found to be most disgraceful, most disturbing.

It began early enough when the president went to his party’s bread and butter: abortion. He began by decrying “state laws banning the freedom to choose, criminalizing doctors, forcing survivors of rape and incest to leave their states to get the treatment they need.”

Biden continued: “Many of you in this chamber, and my predecessor, are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedom else would you take away? Look, since the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court wrote the following, and with all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral power. Excuse me, electoral or political power. You’re about to realize just how much you’ve [unintelligible].”

BREAKING: President Biden attacks Supreme Court Justices over Roe v. Wade (abortion rights) during his State of the Union Address, yells, “With all due respect justices, women are not without electoral or political power. You’re about to realize just how much.” WATCH pic.twitter.com/PYs4rz8kBW

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) March 8, 2024

It was a jarring moment, a not-so-veiled threat, and a grotesque and bald-faced attack against the Supreme Court, the larger judiciary, and the third coequal branch of government. It was alarming to see a Catholic like Biden invoke God’s name (in vain, we’re inclined to think) to demand the right to kill children in the womb.

And to watch and listen to the Democrats’ response, and in particular to see Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leap to his feet directly behind the justices and start grinning and clapping lustily — especially after having himself been rebuked by Chief Justice John Roberts for his vulgar threats against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh almost exactly four years ago — was nothing short of sickening. (To see cabinet secretaries Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin and especially Attorney General Merrick Garland also stand and start clapping immediately to the right of the sitting justices was almost as revolting.)

“I wanna tell you, Gorsuch, I wanna tell you, Kavanaugh,” shouted a fist-pumping Schumer back in early March 2020, “you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”

As we noted earlier, Chief Justice Roberts wasn’t inclined to let Schumer’s attack pass. In a highly unusual written statement issued later that day, Roberts said, “Statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” adding, “All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

The lack of restraint and decorum displayed by Joe Biden last night didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came from somewhere, and that somewhere was Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. That’s when our 44th president inaccurately called out the High Court for its 5-4, pro-free-speech Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which he said “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign companies — to spend without limit in our elections.”

At the time, as Fox News reports, “Obama’s remark drew a look of bewilderment from Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who could be seen mouthing the words ‘not true’ from his seat mere feet away from the president in the House chamber.”

At the time, even CBS News’s Jan Crawford conceded that this call-out was unprecedented: “Obama’s frontal assault on the Supreme Court in a State of the Union is almost unheard of for a president. Typically, presidents who get bad Supreme Court rulings (and they’ve all gotten their share) grimace and bear it, taking the position that the ‘court has spoken.’ I don’t ever remember a Democratic president, in a State of the Union address, take on the Supreme Court for a recent decision and dare Congress to overturn it.”

Politics is politics, but there’s something particularly despicable about a president attacking the Supreme Court and thereby attempting to diminish it, even delegitimize it, as an institution.

It’s just one more way in which Barack Obama kept his 2008 pre-election promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” And one more way in which Joe Biden is following in his former boss’s hard-left, anti-American footprints.