Evening health care round-up
on Nov 14, 2011 at 9:55 pm
This morning the Court issued orders from its November 10 Conference, including orders granting review in three of the pending challenges to the Affordable Care Act. The Court will hear a total of five-and-a-half hours of oral argument, most likely in March. The SCOTUSblog health care resource page, which links to briefs and our coverage of the cases, is available here.
All of the major news outlets and blogs have coverage of the granted cases and the questions that the Court will consider. Lyle Denniston of this blog has summarized the orders here, and he offered further analysis here. Additional coverage is available at Bloomberg, here and here, NPR, the New York Times, USA Today , Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, Reuters, ABA Journal , CNN, and the Huffington Post.
Editorial writers weigh in on the grants as well. At the Washington Post, Charles Lane argues that the “time is not right” for the Court to take up the Affordable Care Act challenges; he warns that although “[t]he justices can declare a law constitutional, “ “[t]hey can’t make it popular. “ By contrast, at the Los Angeles Times, Paul Whitefield urges the Court not to “put this off. We need a decision: Either this system is legal, in which case we can stop arguing and start implementing; or it’s illegal, in which case we can start arguing again and devise a new, better system.” And at The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen assesses the odds “on what is, and what is not, likely to happen between now and next June 28.”
In the blogosphere, the BLT, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog and Health Blog, Politico, National Review Online’s The Corner, and Cato@Liberty all have coverage, while the ACA Litigation Blog has posted both a tentative briefing schedule and resources for the cases.
Finally, a video of Larry Tribe and Paul Clement debating the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act at last weekend’s Federalist Society Convention is available here.
