King v. Burwell, the challenge to the availability of tax subsidies for individuals who purchase health insurance on an exchange created by the federal government, continues to dominate coverage of and commentary on the Court. At The Hill, Sarah Ferris summarizes the current dispute over “standing” – whether the challengers have the legal right to pursue their lawsuit. At MSNBC, Dominic Perella concludes that, if the Court were to dismiss the lawsuit because the plaintiffs lack standing, it “could be a nightmare for Obamacare’s challengers: another year for more people to sign up for insurance through the exchanges, and for more people to reap the benefits of subsidies.” Nicholas Bagley weighs in on the standing issue at The Incidental Economist, expressing “serious doubts about the standing of” three of the four challengers. At The New Republic, Cristian Farias observes that “the Supreme Court, as much as it stands for uniformity and principle, has not been consistent at all in its application of standing, and could very well choose to do whatever it wants with it in King.” And at Balkinization, Rob Weiner contends that “developments since the high water mark when the Court granted review in King do not merely undermine the [challengers’] claims” but “also highlight the significance of the case to the democratic principles at the core of our constitutional system, and, accordingly, to the legitimacy the public accords the Court’s decisions.”
Other coverage focuses on recent appearances by and interviews with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. At NPR, Nina Totenberg reports on the event that she moderated last week: a joint appearance by Justice Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia, at which – among other things – Ginsburg admitted to being not “100 percent sober” at this year’s State of the Union address. Other coverage of that appearance comes from Robert Barnes in The Washington Post and from the BBC News. MSNBC’s Irin Carmon also reports on her interview with Ginsburg, who once again reiterated that she has no plans to retire. Addressing the retirement question, Richard Wolf of USA Today observes that “if any of the four justices now between 76 and 81 years of age were to depart under a president of the opposite party – particularly Ginsburg or Scalia – the ideological swing could be much more dramatic” than occurred with the past few retirements.
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