Friday round-up
on Sep 11, 2015 at 9:54 am
As Lyle reported yesterday for this blog, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., “has cleared the way for a lawsuit by the House of Representatives claiming that the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars on the new health care program without Congress’s permission to do so.” Commentary on the ruling comes from Nicholas Bagley at The Incidental Economist, who suggests that “the stakes of the lawsuit are high—not as high as King v. Burwell, but nothing to sniff at, either.”
Briefly:
- At CNN, Ariane de Vogue reports that, although the Court “isn’t usually a hot topic in the early days of a presidential campaign,” “the 2016 election will be different.”
- At Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro and Andrew Grossman discuss the amicus brief that Cato filed in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association; they argue that requiring workers to affirmatively opt out of union membership fees each year “plainly violates the cardinal rule that procedures involving compelled speech and association must be ‘carefully tailored to minimize the infringement’ of First Amendment rights.”
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, Joshua Thompson discusses the amicus brief that PLF filed in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the challenge to the university’s use of affirmative action; the brief, he explains, outlines “the many ways in which the University’s admissions policy fails to satisfy the Constitution.”
- In a podcast for the Northwestern University Law Review Online, Howard Wasserman analyzes same-sex marriage litigation in Alabama before and after the Court’s June decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
- In Reason, Damon Root has the tale of Horne v. Department of Agriculture, describing it as “more than just the story of small farmers fighting back against big government. It’s also the story of a federal regulation so preposterous and unconstitutional that when it finally landed before the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices practically laughed it out of the building.”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
