Monday round-up
on Jul 9, 2012 at 10:49 am
Nearly two weeks after the Court issued its decision in the health care cases, the media’s focus on those cases shows no signs of slowing down.
At CBS, Jan Crawford reports that the discord at the Court has become “deep and personal,” with the conservative Justices “feel[ing] a sense of betrayal” from the Chief Justice’s decision to uphold the individual mandate. Relatedly, in an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit suggests that the leaks from the Court could backfire.
Commentary on the Court’s opinion and analysis of its consequences also continue. At UPI, Michael Kirkland focuses on the Chief Justice’s characterization of the penalty for failure to buy insurance as a tax, as do Richard Grant of Forbes, Paul Moreno in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, and the editorial board at Bloomberg View. Discussing the opinion more broadly at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler explains why, although he does not agree with the Chief Justice’s approach to the health care cases, he nonetheless “think[s] we can understand it.” Finally, Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press reports that the decision has renewed concerns about the IRS’s capacity to enforce the mandate, while NPR’s Carrie Johnson explains how the opinion may affect civil rights legislation, which is often grounded in the Commerce Clause and Congress’s Spending Power.
At this blog, Tom provides a minute-by-minute account of coverage of the release of the health care decision; at Forbes, Dan Diamond discusses Tom’s post.
Briefly:
- At the Los Angeles Times, David Savage analyzes the Term’s most prominent cases and concludes that the Court’s decisions this year reflect “shifting coalitions” among the Justices rather than “a true ideological shift.”
- In the Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports on the Justices’ use of Google to “routinely supplement their arguments with facts, studies, media reports, law review articles and other materials that none of the parties in the case before them ever put forward or countered.”
- At the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, Joe Palazzolo explores the possibility that the Court’s next juvenile sentencing case will addressed the constitutionality of fixed terms resulting in a sentence that exceeds a defendant’s life expectancy, which some argue is a de facto sentence of life without parole.
- The editorial board of the Washington Post praises the Court’s recent decision in Jackson v. Hobbs and Miller v. Alabama, in which the Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a sentencing scheme that requires life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders.
- At Salon, Glenn Greenwald discusses Justice Elena Kagan’s vote on the Medicaid coercion theory in the context of several other cases in which she has joined with the Court’s more conservative Justices.
- Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick considers why liberals, unlike conservatives, do not get angry when one of their Justices “fails to deliver” and concludes that, to some extent, they should.
- Also at Slate, Jonathan Peters debunks the myth that the Court is immune from leaks, chronicling the institution’s “long and colorful history of leaks that dates back to the mid-19th century.
- At the Daily Beast, David Dow argues that it may be time to reconsider judicial review, in light of the fact that the “fate of the most significant piece of domestic legislation of the past 50 years hinged on the viewpoint of a single man.”
- Diana Henriques of the New York Times examines the consequences of Janus Capital v. First Derivative Traders, the Court’s 2011 case holding that, because a mutual fund investment adviser did not make the false statements included in the mutual fund prospectuses of its clients, the fund could not be held liable in a private action under SEC Rule 10b(5).
