Is Criticism of the Court Politically Damaging?

Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent response to claims (from both predictable and normally more astute quarters) that Obama is likely to pay some kind of political price for attacking the Court over Citizens United. It’s particularly strange to invoke FDR in an argument like this; while it’s true that the Court-packing plan itself failed, it was followed by 1)one of the most productive legislative periods in history that 2)the Supreme Court stopped interfering with.   I’m not really seeing the big political price there.    And, indeed, assumptions that criticisms of the Court will harm presidential authority pretty much stand history on its head: the Court’s most prominent White House critics include presidents like Jefferson and Lincoln and Reagan.

This isn’t to say that a President couldn’t incur political courts from attacking the Court.   But these costs certainly wouldn’t come in a case — like this one — where public opinion is overwhelmingly on the president’s side.