Thursday round-up

By Amanda Rice
on Oct 21, 2010 at 9:05 am

With challenges to the individual health insurance mandate continuing to make their way through the lower courts, commentators have begun to speculate on how the Court might decide the case. In a blog post for the Washington Post, Ezra Klein opines that the mandate is constitutional, but he suggests that “partisan forces” may play a role in the decision. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle agrees that the Court will likely “be extremely reluctant to strike down the individual mandate for a whole host of reasons,” but she expresses doubts that “political worries will be among them.”   And SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston assesses the chances that the issues will reach the Court in the near future. 

In response to recent commentary about the propriety of the Justices’ political conduct “outside the courtroom,” the Room for Debate Blog of the New York Times hosts a five-part discussion about whether Supreme Court Justices should “show restraint in airing their political views.” The debaters consider whether Supreme Court Justices should be expected “to show greater decorum and neutrality than other political actors,” or whether the public might “benefit from their being more transparent about their views.”

Briefly:

• At the Opinionator Blog of the New York Times, Timothy Egan points to the advertising surrounding the Colorado elections as evidence that Citizens United “fundamentally changed how we choose or leaders and our laws, all for the worse.”
• The voicemail message left by Virginia Thomas, Justice Thomas’s wife, for Anita Hill continues to generate discussion. Among others, Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal and Dahlia Lithwick of Slate have coverage.
• At the Huffington Post, Sam Stein asks whether the presence of Justices Scalia and Thomas at “seminars sponsored by the energy giant and conservative bankroller Koch Industries” raises judicial ethics questions.