President Obama caused quite a stir last week with a pair of comments he made about the Supreme Court. Some critics said he was citing constitutional law incorrectly. Others said he was trying to intimidate the justices. Some said he was doing both things.

The intimidation charge was just silly. Obama told reporters he was “confident” the Supreme Court would uphold the Affordable Care Act. That’s the sort of thing politicians say all the time. Intimidating the court would have been threatening to disregard it, as President Andrew Jackson is said to have done in 1832—or, perhaps, hauling the justices before congressional committees, as President-wannabe Newt Gingrich promised to do just a few months ago. At most, Obama was warning that he took the case seriously and was prepared to criticize the court, loudly, if it ruled the law unconstitutional. Surely that's within acceptable bounds of presidential behavior.

As for the accuracy of Obama’s claim, the critics have a point, albeit a small one: The president got a few facts wrong with the first of his two statements. Obama said a decision invalidating a duly passed law would be “unprecedented,” when, in fact, the Court has invalidated duly passed laws, from both Congress and state legislatures, throughout its history. This particular group of justices did it less than two years ago, via the infamous Citizens United decision striking down parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

I assume that Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is aware of these facts. But if you are one of those people convinced Obama is really a dullard who can’t get by without his teleprompter, then go wild. This is your moment.

What’s more important, for the rest of us, is that Obama corrected and clarified the misstatement one day later. Striking down this sort of economic legislation, Obama said, would be unprecedented in the modern era—and reminiscent of the early 20th Century, when the Court threw out multiple pieces of economic regulations from the Progressive Era and then the New Deal. Here's how Obama put it, word for word: