Monday round-up

AMY HOWE SEP 8, 2014 7:56 AM

As Lyle reported for this blog, on Thursday the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit announced that it would rehear the challenge to the subsidies provided to individuals who purchase health care on exchanges established by the federal government.  At The Huffington Post, Brianne Gorod suggests that, as a result of the D.C. Circuit’s order, the challengers’ “chances of getting the case in front of the Supremes just got a lot lower.” 

The Associated Press (via USA Today) reports that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and four other churches have filed an amicus brief urging the Court to “end the divisive national debate as to whether the Constitution mandates same-sex marriage.”  And at The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie observes that, if the Court does (as many expect) take up one or more of the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage, “it might be natural to assume that we’re gearing up for another 4-4 right-left split, with Justice Anthony Kennedy in the middle.”  However, he contends, although “[h]ow Justice Kennedy would rule is indeed an open and highly interesting question, . . . I think it is premature to assume that the court’s four liberals—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—are necessarily itching to enshrine a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to wed.”

Briefly:

• In an op-ed for the ABA Journal, Erwin Chemerinsky highlights three bankruptcy cases from the October Term 2013, arguing that the three are “striking illustrations” of how the Court can be “completely inconsistent, even in unanimous decisions, sometimes taking a textualist approach and sometimes a purposivist approach.”
• At Law360 (subscription or registration required), Jason Steed discusses the Court’s recent decision in Harris v. Quinn, holding that the First Amendment prohibits the collection of an agency fee from a group of Illinois home health care providers who do not wish to join or support a union.  He contends that the case “represents something new – a shift in the conservative view of the First Amendment in the context of public employment and a significant broadening of what was once a much narrower ‘right to work’ in the context of public employee unions.”
• Sam Hananel of the Associated Press (via ABC News) reports on a Texas case that urges the Court to take up a question that it has already agreed to review twice:  whether the Fair Housing Act allows claims based on disparate impact, rather than intentional discrimination.
• At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger notes that death row inmate Warren Lee Hill has filed a petition seeking review of the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling against him in his “challenge to the state law providing confidentiality to the suppliers of the drugs used for lethal injection.”

We’re back on a daily schedule for the round-up.  As always, we rely on our readers to send us links for the round-up:  if you have or know of an article, blog post, or op-ed that is directly related to the Court and was published in the last two or three days, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com so that we can consider it.  Thank you!

[Disclosure: Kevin Russell of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, was among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondent in Harris.]

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