Friday round-up
on Nov 11, 2011 at 9:35 am
Because today is a federal holiday, the Justices held their private Conference yesterday, at which they considered (among other things) five petitions involving challenges to the Affordable Care Act. Orders acting on those petitions could come as soon as Monday morning. Yesterday Lyle Denniston posted a detailed analysis for this blog of the cases and the issues that could be before the Court; Politico, ABC News, USA Today, and the Associated Press (via the Washington Post) all have more coverage, as does Marcia Coyle in a post at The Rundown blog of the PBS NewsHour. And the renewed focus on health care has also led to renewed calls for one or more of the Justices to recuse themselves from the health-care cases: at the National Review Online, Carrie Severino argues that Justice Kagan should recuse herself, while The Hill reports on calls for Justice Thomas to do the same. And in an op-ed at Politico, Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center discusses the prospect that “if the court upholds the act’s constitutionality and its ‘individual mandate,’ it could sound the death knell for the Tea Party.” The University of Richmond Law School will host a symposium today on procedural aspects of the litigation. There will be a live webcast here.
Elsewhere, coverage of this week’s oral arguments continues. Tom Goldstein of this blog discusses National Meat Association v. Harris, which was argued on Wednesday. At Law.com, Joshua Engel discusses the oral argument in United States v. Jones, as does Jacob Sullum at Reason. At Cato@Liberty, Jim Harper critiques a factual assertion made during the oral argument in Jones, while Rebecca Rosen of the Atlantic examines the intersection, reflected in Jones, between new technology and old laws.
