The first day of oral argument over the Affordable Care Act brought a flurry of news coverage. Kali rounded up early coverage yesterday afternoon, while headlines continued to trickle in overnight. Lyle Denniston of this blog provides a detailed recap of the Justices’ reactions, observing that “the 89-minute exchange left the distinct impression that they are prepared to rule on the constitutionality of the mandate that individuals must buy health insurance, and not push the issue off into the future.” Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal also report that the Court seems unlikely to delay the ruling. At Bloomberg, the editorial board comes out in favor of the ACA, arguing that “the law takes a great many small steps in the right direction”; commentators at Time, Washington Post, and National Journal also weighed in. NPR, Slate, CBS News, USA Today, McClatchy, New York Times, and New York Post all provide more coverage of the oral argument, while the Associated Press (via Washington Post) looks at the “different kind of democracy” taking place on the steps outside of the Court. Dorf on Law and Balkinization look ahead to today and tomorrow’s scheduled arguments.
But the health care litigation wasn’t the only news out of the Court today. Many outlets – including Bloomberg, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press – reported on the Court’s decision in Zivotofsky v. Clinton. Lyle Denniston of this blog analyzes the opinion, which assigns lower courts “the task of sorting out a potentially fundamental issue over how – or whether — the President or Congress controls a very sensitive foreign policy issue, in this case dealing with the tinderbox of Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek offers coverage of the Court’s other opinion released yesterday in Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC v. Simmonds.
The Court’s order list also captured attention, particularly its denials of review. The Court denied cert. in R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. Martin, in which the Reynolds Tobacco Company was ordered by a Florida state court to pay millions of dollars to a woman whose husband died from lung cancer attributed to smoking Reynolds cigarettes. Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press, and UPI have coverage. Edweek’s School Law blog reports on two denied appeals involving religion in public schools. Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Christian Science Monitor report that the Court also declined to consider reinstating a Wisconsin law that banned publicly funded hormone treatment for transgender prison inmates. The Court also ordered the Federal Circuit to revisit whether human genes can be patented, at issue in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, in light of the Justices’ decision last week in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus. Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Salt Lake Tribune, New York Times, and Reuters (via Chicago Tribune) offer more coverage. The Court did grant certiorari in Florida v. Harris, the drug-sniffing dog case described by the Associated Press, and, as Greenwire reports, asked for the Solicitor General’s views in American Trucking Associations v. City of Los Angeles.
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