Friday round-up
on Jul 6, 2012 at 10:12 am
Last week’s decision in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act continues to dominate coverage of the Court, with new emphasis being placed on the relationship between the opinion and the Act’s implementation. General reporting comes from CNN and ABC News, with additional analysis of the decision’s effect on the health care industry at the Philadelphia Inquirer. At ACSblog, Sarah Lipton-Lubet discusses the implications of the Court’s decision and its denial of certiorari in Seven-Sky v. Holder for birth-control litigation, while at the Health Affairs Blog, Timothy Jost reports on actions by the Department of Health and Human Services in the wake of the opinion.
Coverage of the opinion’s implications for the enforcement of the individual mandate comes from Lyle at this blog; commentary on the same topic comes from The Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic. Coverage of the implementation of the Medicaid expansion primarily addresses whether individual states will choose to expand their programs in light of the Court’s analysis. Reporting at Bloomberg, the Seattle Times, and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog addresses state-by-state breakdowns of the issues. The Center for American Progress has created a national map on this issue, which NPR also covers.
Attention also centers on the political ramifications of the Court’s decision. At CBS News, Jan Crawford has an interview about the decision with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in which Romney refers to the individual mandate as a tax and discusses the Chief Justice’s opinion. Coverage of Romney’s remarks comes from Bloomberg, The New York Times (here and here), the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, and The Hill. Additional commentary on the interview comes from the editorial board of The New York Times. Other commentary focusing on the opinion and the Court more broadly comes from Noah Feldman at Bloomberg View, Josh Gerstein at Politico, and Roger Pilon at Cato@Liberty, with further reporting from The Washington Post.
The substantive aspects of the decision continue to garner both praise and criticism, with the Los Angeles Times collecting views on both sides. At Guernica, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy primarily criticizes the opinion’s analysis of the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses. At Dorf on Law, Neil Buchanan follows up on his Verdict post (which Cormac covered in yesterday’s round-up) in continuing to reject the dissenters’ taxing power argument. Nicole Huberfeld at Concurring Opinions characterizes the Medicaid analyses as “open[ing] the floodgates for coercion litigation.” And at The New York Times, William Forbath criticizes the “defensive” liberal response to the opinion. Further general reporting on the substantive aspects of the decision comes from CNN, and commentary comes from Randy Barnett at The Volokh Conspiracy, in an analysis of the “unprecedented uniqueness” of the Chief Justice’s opinion.
Coverage and commentary of Chief Justice Roberts in particular also continues, with Jess Bravin at the WSJ Law Blog reporting on potential early clues to the Chief Justice’s position in the case, and Joan Biskupic at Reuters revisiting the Chief Justice’s path to the Court. Further commentary comes from Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy and Mark Tushnet at Balkinization.
In other coverage of the Court and the health care decision, Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reports on the “unusual unity” displayed by the Court this Term, even in the Affordable Care Act litigation. NPR revisits Wickard v. Filburn, which was broadly considered to mark a significant expansion of Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause, as it relates to the decision. At this blog, Amanda Frost analyzes the legal scholars and scholarship surrounding this case. Vikram Amar at Verdict presents a list of ten important take-away points from the decision. And finally, Nina Totenberg at NPR puts the decision in perspective with a review of the Term as a whole.
Other coverage focuses on the Court’s consolidated opinion in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, in which it barred mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile homicide offenders. At the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, Doug Berman criticizes a recent editorial in The New York Times on the decision, arguing that the editorial overstated the potential impact of the Court’s opinion. Additional coverage comes from the San Francisco Chronicle, while additional commentary comes from the Detroit News and the Charlotte Observer.
Briefly:
- Writing at Constitution Daily, Lyle discusses potential paths to the Court for either the Defense of Marriage Act cases or the Ninth Circuit’s Proposition 8 case, with additional commentary coming from E.J. Graff at The American Prospect.
- The ACLU praised last week’s opinion in United States v. Alvarez, which struck down the Stolen Valor Act.
- Miles Mogulescu at the Huffington Post argues that the Court’s summary reversal in American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock, striking down Montana’s century-old campaign-finance law, “will have even more impact on the future of America than the decision upholding the ACA.”
- Commentators continue to discuss Arizona v. United States, in which the Court struck down most – but not all – of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s controversial immigration law. At the New York Daily News, Charles Krauthammer discusses the decision’s implications for executive authority, while Robert Groban at Thomson Reuters suggests that the decision may be a Pyrrhic victory for Arizona.
- An article in the Washington Times focuses on Antoine Jones, the respondent in this Term’s United States v. Jones, the Fourth Amendment GPS tracking case.
- Thomson Reuters analyzes the relationship between consumer advocates and PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, the OT 2010 case holding that federal regulations preempt state tort suits against generic drug manufacturers regarding the adequacy of their warning labels.
- Over at Slate, Emily Bazelon considers lessons to be learned from this past Term and the Affordable Care Act cases in particular regarding Supreme Court oral arguments.
- The Environmental Law Prof Blog speculates on the Court’s reasons for granting certiorari in Los Angeles County Flood Control District v. NRDC, a Clean Water Act case involving stormwater permits.
- Publishers Weekly reviews an amicus brief filed by the Library Copyright Alliance in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
