Biden’s prepared remarks included a reference to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, quoting Justice Samuel Alito’s excuse that the matter of abortion access should be handled at the ballot box in the states: “Women are not without electoral or political power.” Biden extemporaneously turned that passage into a direct attack on the high court.

“In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following—and with all due respect, justices—‘women are not without electoral or political power,’” Biden said, directly addressing the six judges attending. “You’re about to realize just how much you were right about that.”

“Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women, but they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot, we won in 2022 and we will win again in 2024,” Biden continued. “If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

That’s an “astonishing” moment in a state of the union, said Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC commentator and former Senate aide. “There was that moment that I think we all remember of the way he attacked—I guess, is the word for it—the Supreme Court to their faces, where the camera then goes to this shot of the six SCOTUS justices, three of whom he was very specifically attacking,” he said.

Three, that is, because Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the author of the horribly momentous Dobbs decision, didn’t bother to show. “That’s never been done before, to the extent that a president has a disagreement with the Supreme Court expressed in the State of the Union address,” O’Donnell continued. “That was just astonishing.”

It’s not just astonishing. It’s a critical admonishment to the Supreme Court, which still has some democracy-defining decisions to make this term, not the least of which is whether an insurrectionist ex-president is above the law.