Monday round-up
on Feb 2, 2015 at 5:41 am
Coverage and commentary continue to focus on King v. Burwell, the case scheduled for oral argument next month in which the Court will consider whether individuals who purchase their health insurance on an exchange established by the federal government are eligible for tax subsidies for those purchases. At Balkinization, Timothy Jost discusses the amicus briefs filed in support of the federal government in the case, while in the New Republic Cristin Farias looks at the “clues” that “point to Scalia as a decisive vote in whether federal subsidies for all Americans survive.” In The Huffington Post, Doug Kendall contends that “one of the key assertions made by the central Supreme Court advocates for King has been called false by the very senator relied upon by these advocates,” but at the National Review’s Bench Memos blog Carrie Severino counters that “the petitioners in the case don’t think their case turns on Ben Nelson’s subjective reading of the law, much less on an after-the-fact interpretation of his previous position laid out in a letter written to aid his fellow Democrats’ litigation position.” And in The Incidental Economist, Nicholas Bagley argues that, if the Court invalidates the subsidies, “any suggestion Congress will just clean up the mess should be taken with a huge grain of salt.”
The role of the Court and its precedent in the case of Warren Hill, who was executed in Georgia last week, also has drawn commentary. At The Week, Andrew Cohen asserts that “Warren Hill is dead. . . . And so is the pretense that this is a court more concerned with embracing evolving standards of decency than with wallowing in sterile formalism that is the opposite of justice.” Kenneth Jost echoes those thoughts at Jost on Justice, writing that for Hill and another inmate executed last week, “the Supreme Court’s decisions were only words on paper, an empty promise of enlightened justice.”
Briefly:
- In an op-ed for The Daily Caller, Ron Fein discusses the “dignity” argument in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, the challenge to a state rule prohibiting candidates for judgeships from personally soliciting campaign contributions.
- In The National Law Journal (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that “[a] coalition of news media and public interest organizations is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to break from tradition and allow broadcast coverage of theupcoming arguments in the landmark same-sex marriage cases.”
- In another article for The National Law Journal (subscription required), Mauro reports on the Court’s announcement that, beginning this month, “responses in disciplinary actions would be made public.”
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