Monday round-up
on Dec 30, 2013 at 9:02 am
With Utah expected – as early as today — to ask the Court to stop same-sex marriages there, coverage of the Court continues to focus on the Utah case and how it might fare at the Supreme Court. Writing for this blog, Lyle Denniston looks at some of Utah’s options, while Michael Kirkland of UPI looks at both the status of the current proceedings in Utah and New Mexico, as well as the Court’s recent same-sex marriage decisions, and suggests that, because “[t]he justices have a historical reluctance to get too far ahead of the U.S. public on social issues,” for now “they may be content to leave the matter with the individual states and the lower courts.”
On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the National Security Agency’s data collection program does not violate the Constitution – a ruling that conflicts with an earlier decision by another federal judge in Washington, D.C., and therefore increases the likelihood that the Supreme Court will weigh in. Lyle Denniston covered those developments for this blog; in an interview with the PBS Newshour, Adam Liptak discusses how the Justices might view the case and concludes that the answer may depend on the lens through which the Justices look at it: “If you look at it through the lens of national security,” it could break down as a liberal-versus-conservative question, he contends, but “[i] f you look at it through the lens of the Fourth Amendment, more generally, the court has been scrambled, and a conservative like Justice Scalia has occasionally taken a more protective attitude toward privacy rights than some of his conservative brethren.”
Briefly:
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor will press the button to lower the ball at New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve. CNN has the story.
