Justice Alito’s reaction to a portion of President Obama’s State of the Union has sent heads spinning.

The Post also has major coverage this morning.

And legal experts said they had never seen anything quite like it, a rare and unvarnished showdown between two political branches during what is usually the careful choreography of the State of the Union address.

“I can’t ever recall a president taking a swipe at the Supreme Court like that,” said Lucas A. Powe Jr., a Supreme Court expert at the University of Texas law school. The closest precedent most could find was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s criticism of the court in his 1937 address to Congress.