Monday round-up
on Mar 9, 2015 at 6:45 am
Oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the challenge to the availability of tax subsidies for individuals who purchase their health insurance on a marketplace created by the federal government, may have ended Wednesday morning, but coverage and commentary continue. Coverage comes from David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, who focuses on the Chief Justice and the issue of agency deference; from Debra Cassens Weiss for the ABA Journal; and from Tony Mauro of the Supreme Court Brief, who reports on the “cameo role” played by Justice Elena Kagan’s law clerks in the oral argument.
Commentary comes from Timothy Jost, who argues in The Huffington Post that “[o]ne of the Red Herring flopping about on the deck” of the case “is the analogy of the territorial exchanges” – the exchanges established in U.S. territories like the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico; at the National Review’s Bench Memos, where Carrie Severino weighs in on the oral argument; from LeRoy Goldman, who discusses the political implications of the Court’s ruling in the Asheville Citizen-Times; and from Jonathan Cohn, also in The Huffington Post, who contends that, “[t]o find a case in modern history that produced a similarly widespread, immediate impact, you . . . probably have to go back to Roe v. Wade or maybe all the way back to Brown v. Board of Education.” At PrawfsBlawg, Rick Hills argues that the case “presents a golden opportunity for . . . a grand bargain” on federalism between liberals on the one side and libertarians and conservatives on the other, while at Balkinization Rob Weiner contends that silence in the history of the ACA regarding the consequences of the challengers’ reading “is thus a clarion refutation of the challengers’ claims.”
Other coverage focuses on the friend-of-the-Court briefs filed in the challenge to state bans on same-sex marriage, which is scheduled for oral argument on April 28. Lyle Denniston of this blog and Tony Mauro of the Blog of Legal Times (subscription required) cover the filing by the federal government, which urged the Court to strike down the state bans, while at The Christian Science Monitor, Cristina Maza reports that 379 companies “threw support behind gay marriage rights” in a brief filed last week. Elsewhere at the Blog of Legal Times, Mauro reports on the Court’s announcement that it will release same-day audio of the oral arguments.
Briefly:
- At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “lawyers for seven couples on Friday asked a federal judge in Mobile to allow such marriages across the entire state. That runs directly contrary to a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court, enforcing a statewide ban.”
- In The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin interviews Edward Gero, the actor who plays Justice Antonin Scalia in The Originalist, a play that opened on Friday in Washington.
- At his eponymous blog, Ryan Whalen displays his interactive map of the network of Supreme Court specialists.
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