December 19, 2010
The HCLSC – health care litigation spin cycle – is in overdrive now that a Reagan-appointed federal judge has strongly signaled in court that he is very likely to follow a George W. Bush appointee who struck down the individual mandate at the heart of the new health care law.
Republican critics of the law were saying that “several” (that is, two) judges had found...
December 13, 2010
Lawyer and journalist Stuart Taylor discusses today’s development in health care reform. U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia struck down a key part of the new health law, saying that the mandate on most Americans to buy health coverage is unconstitutional.
Watch the video or listen to the audio.
Transcript:
JACKIE JUDD: Good day. This is Health on the Hill. I'm...
October 6, 2010
Some conservatives plausibly argue that Solicitor General Elena Kagan would be the kind of liberal activist justice that they deplore.
There is plenty of material to support that claim -- and also some material that cuts against it -- in the tens of thousands of pages of documents involving Kagan's work in the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1999 that are being released in batches.
And there...
September 20, 2010
Two conservative federal judges have now voiced cautiously sympathetic views on legal challenges to the 2,400-page health-care law that President Obama signed into law in March. But such preliminary skirmishes shed little light on whether the Supreme Court will in the end strike down the law, a law that raises a completely novel legal issue: can Congress require millions of individuals to buy a...
September 13, 2010
The federal court decision last Thursday holding unconstitutional the 1993 "don't ask, don't tell" policy that excludes openly gay people from the military may well presage a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 killing that policy once and for all. Unless Congress kills it first. The main reason: public assertions by both Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and...
August 5, 2010
The outcome was never in doubt. But the narrowness of the 63–37 margin by which the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as Supreme Court's 112th justice this afternoon would stun a Rip Van Winkle who had slept through the rising partisan rancor that has poisoned judicial confirmations at all levels in recent years.
The vote in 1993 to confirm Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who had a considerably more...
July 14, 2010
Why does the supposedly nonpartisan Supreme Court split so often along ideological lines, with the four conservatives locked in combat against the four liberals and the eclectic Justice Anthony Kennedy determining which faction wins?
And why do all of the justices so often find in the Constitution a mirror image of their own political and policy views on issues as diverse as abortion, race,...
June 30, 2010
Roughly since dinosaurs walked the earth, Supreme Court confirmation hearings have featured the spectacle of Republicans and Democrats alike rearranging their principles depending on the party of the nominating president and the nominee. The hearing on Elena Kagan, who completed her testimony Wednesday with other witnesses scheduled to testify late Thursday, has been no exception. On the...
June 30, 2010
As Elena Kagan's hearings ground through their third day, with confirmation virtually assured, viewers learned little that was new about the nominee. Mostly they saw senatorial skirmishes to fire up the conservative and liberal bases in an election year.
Republican senators tried to paint Kagan as political and deceptive on issues including so-called partial-birth abortion. But her detailed...
June 29, 2010
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Judiciary Committee's least partisan member, injected a distinctive and salutary element Tuesday afternoon into a dreary confirmation process drenched in partisanship, yet devoid of real drama. The South Carolina Republican engaged Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a good-natured dialogue—and tried to teach viewers a lesson—about the need to tamp down the bitter...
