Tuesday round-up
on Jul 3, 2012 at 11:01 am
Coverage of and commentary on the Court continue to parse Thursday’s landmark ruling in the Affordable Care Act litigation.
Much of the coverage and commentary focuses on the Chief Justice’s vote and reactions thereto. At Politico, Jennifer Haberkorn and Darren Samuelsohn describe conservatives as “seeing red” after Sunday’s story by Jan Crawford of CBS News reporting that the Chief Justice switched his opinion to uphold the mandate. The Atlantic Wire and Reason also report on this “anger” and “fury,” while Noah Feldman at Bloomberg View, Laurence Tribe at PBS, Robert Barnes of The Washington Post, William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, Ilya Shapiro of Cato@Liberty, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, and Mark Sherman of the Associated Press all discuss the Chief Justice’s vote. And at Slate, Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick dispute accusations that the Chief Justice acted politically, arguing that “on a nation’s high court, in which legal precedents rarely decide cases, what one calls law and what goes in the vernacular by politics often come together.”
Other coverage and commentary focus on the text of the health care decision and its implications for conservative ideology. At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin suggests a “simple solution” for resolving questions over whether the Court’s Commerce Clause conclusions are part of the holding or dictum: “just look at what the Court itself said the holding was.” Deborah Pearlstein of Balkinization explains that she has “a hard time seeing the decision as quite so necessarily damaging on its own to the future power of the feds,” while Steven Schwinn of Constitutional Law Prof Blog contends that the decision’s net effect on the Necessary and Proper Clause was “[v]ery little.” Forbes provides a basic explanation of the decision, while Roger Pilon of Cato@Liberty finds the “silver lining” in the decision. Writing for Salon, Andrew Koppelman sums up the decision: “What is really at war here is different conceptions of individual liberty.”
And finally, recaps of and reflections on the Term as a whole are trickling in. At the Congressional Quarterly Research Blog, Kenneth Jost concludes that at the end of the Term the Court “def[ied] conventional wisdom and its own predominantly conservative orientation” all Term. ACLU and Mololamken also provide overviews of key civil rights and business cases, respectively. And Adam Liptak has a Term recap for NPR’s Fresh Air.
Briefly:
- At Dorf on Law, Mike Dorf focuses on another of last Thursday’s decisions: United States v. Alvarez, in which the Court held that the Stolen Valor Act violates the First Amendment.
