He, Trump being the shiny object that outshines all the other shiny objects, it's no surprise that the first song sung in unison by the birds of our elite political media as they all perch on the same wire together—and thank you, Gene McCarthy, for that immortal, and eternally apt, metaphor—was that the president took "shots" at America's most prominent and most vulgar talking yam. This was true enough. He, Trump is a pretty big fish in a pretty small barrel. Hell, even Governor Nikki Haley took a veiled swipe at him in her steel-toothed response to the president's address.

(Pro tip: Nikki Haley lost any chance of being a nationally prominent Republican of any kind on Tuesday night. Please ignore all arguments to the contrary on this subject. Most of them are wishful thinking based on the fanciful notion of a sane Republican party.)

But to concentrate on He, Trump is to miss a lot of what the president was about on Tuesday night, and it is also to miss one of the subtler—but critically more important—targets of his muted ire, and that is the United States Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts. There is something of a history between this President's State of the Union addresses and the current membership of the Court. In 2010, you may recall, the president threw some serious shade at the Court for its heinous decision in the Citizens United case. In the audience, Justice Samuel Alito—who, like Roberts, is on the court because there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Al Gore and C-Plus Augustus—was visibly agitated. Since then, Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin (Short Time) Scalia have engaged in a hive-mind boycott of this president's annual speech. They are not missed. Anyway, last night, in his stirring peroration about the role of citizens in a viable democracy, the president threw some thinly disguised chin music again at the decisions handed down by the Nine Wise Souls during his presidency.

It is more than a little ironic—and a damned sight more than a little inevitable—that the election of the country's first African-American president would result in some of the most destructive decisions ever handed down by a Supreme Court on the subject of how we govern ourselves. Citizens United unleashed the money power in our politics to an extent unseen since the last Gilded Age. McCutcheon pretty much finished the job. Shelby County eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and unleashed voter suppression in our politics to an extent unseen since the glory days of the Jim Crow South. (How John Lewis just doesn't wake up one morning and take an ax to work is still beyond me.) That is the spavined, crippled democracy that the Roberts Court has constructed deliberately during the two terms of President Barack Obama, and the system within which we will elect his successor. And this is what he said Tuesday night:

But, my fellow Americans, this cannot be my task—or any President's—alone. There are a whole lot of folks in this chamber who would like to see more cooperation, a more elevated debate in Washington, but feel trapped by the demands of getting elected. I know; you've told me. And if we want a better politics, it's not enough to just change a Congressman or a Senator or even a President; we have to change the system to reflect our better selves. We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around. We have to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families and hidden interests can't bankroll our elections—and if our existing approach to campaign finance can't pass muster in the courts, we need to work together to find a real solution. We've got to make voting easier, not harder, and modernize it for the way we live now. And over the course of this year, I intend to travel the country to push for reforms that do. But I can't do these things on my own. Changes in our political process—in not just who gets elected but how they get elected—that will only happen when the American people demand it. It will depend on you. That's what's meant by a government of, by, and for the people.

Nobody in that chamber possibly could have missed what he was saying here, any more than they could have missed who he was referring to when he said, "That's why we need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn't a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of understanding what makes us strong." Unless people take very seriously their obligations to self-government, the next president will be elected in a system rotten at its core with big money and circumscribed at its edges by venal trickery. (In this campaign, it is Bernie Sanders who reminds people in every speech that no president can do it all alone.) I have said a few times that this president finally won my support with that passage in his 2012 acceptance speech about "the hard and necessary work of self-government." The defense of a viable self-governing political commonwealth has been a theme here in the shebeen since we first hung out the shingle in 2011. His whole presidency has been that kind of a challenge to the rest of us. I am damn glad I voted for this guy twice.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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