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US Supreme Court Tag

Posted by Jay Caruso on June 30, 2015 23 Comments
The Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency 5-4 this week, saying the EPA erred in not considering costs when implementing new regulations governing toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants:
The 5-4 decision Monday went against an Environmental Protection Agency mercury rule that forces utilities to shutter old coal plants or invest billions of dollars in equipment to clean up the emissions from their smokestacks. The court said the EPA should have considered the costs and benefits before deciding whether to impose those limits on the toxic emissions. “The agency must consider cost -— including, most importantly, cost of compliance -— before deciding whether regulation is appropriate and necessary,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. “Reasonable regulation ordinarily requires paying attention to the advantages and the disadvantages of agency decisions.”
Ironically, the rule could stay on the books while the EPA performs the analysis:
The decision to send the regulation back to a lower court to decide what happens next leaves open the possibility that the 2011 rule, called the mercury and air toxics regulation, could be left on the books while the agency does the analysis that the high court said it should have done long ago. It could take a few months for that lower-court decision.
Despite the victory, it may have come at a cost that is too late to recover. The rule went into place several years ago and the impact has taken its toll:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 29, 2015 16 Comments
Could the Supreme Court's latest actions result in a set-back for the pro-life community? Wednesday, 10 of Texas' 19 abortion clinics were set to close thanks to a law passed by the Texas Legislature in 2013. The law that would've required abortion clinics to maintain hospital-like standards was enough to force 10 clinics out of the abortion business. Those standards included, "minimum sizes for rooms and doorways, pipelines for anesthesia and other infrastructure," according to the Texas Tribune. In addition to the hospital-like standards requirement, physicians conducting abortions were required to, "have admitting privileges at local hospitals," reported the Washington Post.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 29, 2015 19 Comments
The Supreme Court today refused to accept a case which sought to allow states to supplement a federal voter registration form so as to require proof of citizenship to vote. Such proof is particularly important given how freely many states are handing out drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, and the Obama administration's unilateral implementation of quasi-amnesty deferrals (some of which were stopped in court). It's just not enough anymore that someone is here legally (or at least, is not being deported). The Petition for Certiorari and other filings in Kobach v. United States Election Assistance Commission are here. The 10th Circuit decision is here. ScotusBlog summarized the issues:
Issue: (1) Whether Article I, Section 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to defer to the states’ determination that provision of documentary evidence of citizenship is necessary to enforce the states’ voter qualifications; and (2) whether Article I, Section 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution permit a dual voter rolls system in which some voters who are qualified to vote for federal office holders are not also qualified to vote for those “in the most numerous branch of the state legislature.”
Bloomberg Politics reports on the development:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 28, 2015 83 Comments
Forty-eight hours after the Supreme Court's monumental gay marriage decision, and progressives are already calling for an end to tax exemptions for churches. Anticipating the Supreme Court's eventual ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Raul Labrador introduced the First Amendment Defense Act. The bill would protect religious institutions who, for religious beliefs, do not actively participate in gay wedding ceremonies. In an op-ed published two weeks ago in the Deseret News, Sen. Lee explained:
This is a bill that would prohibit the federal government from penalizing individuals or institutions on the basis that they act in accordance with a religious belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. The First Amendment Defense Act, which Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, will introduce in the House of Representatives, would prevent any agency from denying a federal tax exemption, grant, contract, accreditation, license or certification to an individual or institution for acting on their religious beliefs about marriage.
Supreme Court Gay Marriage Oral Argument Fox News Tax Exemption After hearing the oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, Sen. Lee was most disturbed by a question asked by Justice Alito.

Posted by Julius Kairey on June 28, 2015 26 Comments
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, much of social media instantly descended into a mob of gleefulness, unrestrained by reason or critical thinking. People were so ecstatic at the arrival of nationwide same-sex marriage that they could not realize what they were losing in the process. Last Friday, the Supreme Court stole from them, and all of us, something fundamental: the right to govern ourselves. The decision last week was not about whether gay marriage is a good or a bad idea. Reasonable people can disagree about that. The question was: who decides? Do the people decide by debate and deliberation, through referendums, legislative action, protests, and other democratic activity? Or do nine lawyers decide the issue by majority vote, without accountability to the people? Justice Kennedy’s opinion -- which reads like a sociological treatise rather than a legal judgement -- is nothing less than a sweeping assertion that constitutional text and history can be dispensed with when making judicial determinations.

Posted by Amy Miller on June 28, 2015 15 Comments
Last week's breathtakingly disappointing Supreme Court decision in the King v. Burwell Obamacare subsidy case still has activists reeling. Where do we go from here? Burwell was a narrow case, but its ruling is one more brick we'll have to deal with when tearing down the health care house that Barack built. Still, progressives are riding high in the wake of the ruling, using it as a tactic to bolster confidence in the program and fight back conservative opposition to the health care law. Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took to the airwaves to praise the ruling and above all, defend her pet program---by insisting that people stop her on the streets to thank her for Obamacare. Watch, via Real Clear Politics:
I think this law has always been about people who wanted and needed desperately affordable health coverage. There's 6.4 million people who now know the coverage that they have, can continue on with subsidies and millions more who can take advantage of it. I've been a lucky one, I've always had affordable available health care. So I feel great for the people who talk to me every day in the grocery store and on airplanes and stop me on sidewalks and tell me that this has changed their life forever. They no longer have to worry about affording health care if they get sick, taking care of their kids and this is a very good day for those Americans.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 28, 2015 22 Comments
Ted Cruz is not at all happy with the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding ObamaCare subsidies and gay marriage, and  his solution is bound to be controversial. He's proposing a constitutional amendment that would make the Supreme Court justices subject to judicial-retention elections. Here's his tweet about it: He also wrote a lengthy piece for The National Review in which he argues that the Supreme Court has rendered decisions that are lawless examples of judicial activism and that undermine the Court's very legitimacy.  Cruz writes:
The Framers of our Constitution, despite their foresight and wisdom, did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. The Constitution explicitly provides that justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” and this is a standard they are not remotely meeting. The Framers thought Congress’s “power of instituting impeachments,” as Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, would be an “important constitutional check” on the judicial branch and would provide “a complete security” against the justices’ “deliberate usurpations of the authority of the legislature.”

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 27, 2015 14 Comments
Following the surreal decision of the Supreme Court regarding ObamaCare subsidies, Texas Representative Brian Babin (R) wants to ensure that the justices take full advantage of the law they just contorted in order to save it.  Picking up Justice Scalia's comment that the decision effectively turns ObamaCare into SCOTUScare, Babin has introduced a bill that requires Supreme Court justices to sign up for ObamaCare. Watch: From Babin's website:
U.S. Representative Brian Babin (TX-36) issued the following statement today after introducing the SCOTUScare Act (H.R. 2905), which finally eliminates their exemption and requires all U.S. Supreme Court Justices and their employees to sign up for Obamacare:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 27, 2015 49 Comments
Today, The NY Times turned its entire front page above the fold to celebrating yesterday's Supreme Court decision on gay marriage: NY Times Supreme Court Gay Marriage Headline Front Page Many national and major regional papers did the same. But is any diversity of news coverage permitted on such a huge cultural victory? If you want to know what the future of the post-SCOTUS SSM culture war looks like, take a look at this tweet by former MSM exec. Betsy Fischer Martin (h/t @bryanjacoutot) complaining that a north Louisiana paper had a larger headline about a local pageant than the Supreme Court's gay marriage decision. The Supreme Court decision was front page, above the fold, right hand side, double column, and was followed just below it with another report about the impact of the decision. But that a local pageant story had more column space apparently was unacceptable:

Posted by Amy Miller on June 26, 2015 135 Comments
Today's ruling in the Obergefell same-sex marriage case sent shockwaves rolling across the nation. Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream read the decision on the air as the crowd outside the Court cheered: The scene outside the Supreme Court right now is kind of a circus:

Posted by New Neo on June 25, 2015 37 Comments
A dissent has no power except the power of its words and its logic. So Justice Scalia's dissent in King v. Burwell (joined by Alito and Thomas) is satisfying only in the rhetorical and intellectual sense. But it is so good that I'm highlighting it again anyway. Here are some excerpts:
[T]he plain, obvious, and rational meaning of a statute is always to be preferred to any curious, narrow, hidden sense that nothing but the exigency of a hard case and the ingenuity and study of an acute and powerful intellect would discover.” Lynch v. Alworth-Stephens Co., 267 U. S. 364, 370 (1925)...Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved... ...The somersaults of statutory interpretation [this Court has] performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 25, 2015 139 Comments
My soundbite: "The Supreme Court today rewrote Obamacare in order to save Obamacare. The plain meaning of the term 'Exchange established by the State' was contorted to mean established by the State or Federal government. That contortion, Justice Scalia correctly noted in dissent, effectively has turned Obamacare into SCOTUScare." ---------- Decision just in in King v. Burwell. Here. In a 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court held that subsidies are available on the federal exchanges. Those voting in the majority were Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Had the court ruled otherwise, it would have put all of Obamacare in jeopardy, since 38 states do not have exchanges and Obamacare is too expensive for most people without a subsidy. The issue was whether only state-established exchanges could issue tax credits, or whether the federal exchanges could also. Challengers to IRS regulations pointed to the words “established by the State” in the legislation as clear and unambiguous that subsidies were limited to state exchanges. The Court rejected this assertion:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 24, 2015 93 Comments
Possibly as soon as Thursday morning, but certainly by early next week, we will know how the Supreme Court rules on the issue of whether denying same-sex couples the ability to marry violates the U.S. Constitution. Lyle Denniston at ScotusBlog summarized the case as follows:
Taking on a historic constitutional challenge with wide cultural impact, the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon [January 16, 2015] agreed to hear four new cases on same-sex marriage. The Court said it would rule on the power of the states to ban same-sex marriages and to refuse to recognize such marriages performed in another state.... The Court fashioned the specific questions it is prepared to answer, but they closely tracked the two core constitutional issues that have led to a lengthy string of lower-court rulings striking down state bans. As of now, same-sex marriages are allowed in thirty-six states, with bans remaining in the other fourteen but all are under court challenge. Although the Court said explicitly that it was limiting review to the two basic issues, along the way the Justices may have to consider what constitutional tests they are going to apply to state bans, and what weight to give to policies that states will claim to justify one or the other of the bans....
I hate trying to predict court rulings, but the political winds have changed dramatically the past few years, so if I had to bet, I'd bet that the ruling is 5-4 for gay marriage. [Warning - my bets tend to be counter-indicators.] Don't think for a second that politics and public opinion doesn't influence such historic cases. I also expect Elena Kagan to be one of the five, based on her comments during oral argument, via NY Times:

Posted by Amy Miller on June 22, 2015 62 Comments
Today, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that stands to drastically change the relationship farmers have with the federal government. The order in Horne, et al. v. Department of Agriculture turned on its head the idea that the government can seize an entire "bundle" of property rights, yet avoid classifying that seizure as a taking as long as they allow the original owners to retain some manner of interest in the property. In 2001, Marvin and Laura Horne challenged that very premise when they decided to withhold portions of their raisin crop that the government mandated be relinquished to the Raisin Administrative Committee (which is indeed a real thing); the Hornes were fined almost a million dollars for their transgressions, but they fought back, arguing that the Committee's seizure of even a portion of an individual farmer's crop as a condition of participating in the market constituted an unconstitutional taking.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 21, 2015 7 Comments
Think tanks, policy wonks, legislative staffers, and politijunkies are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling on King v. Burwell. As for the rest of the country, most have clue why this case is so crucial. John David Danielson of The Federalist addressed this issue Thursday:
According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 7 in 10 Americans have heard little or nothing about King v. Burwell, the U.S. Supreme Court case that will, any day now, decide the fate of Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. Yet 63 percent of those surveyed also say that if the court rules against the government, Congress should act to keep those subsidies in place. Got that? The vast majority of Americans know almost nothing about this case, but 63 percent have an opinion about what Congress should do in response to a ruling that carries certain policy implications.
Thanks for nothing, Media. But what about those enrolled in Obamacare? The Foundation for Government Accountability surveyed voters enrolled in a federal exchange heath care plan. Obamacare customers do think Congress should act to change the law, but not for the same reasons as the general respondents surveyed in the Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 20, 2015 24 Comments
There has been a lot of speculation, including by me, about what the Republican-controlled Congress will do should the Supreme Court rule against Obama in King v. Burwell.  Should the Court strike down federal subsidies, Republicans will need to have a plan in place to address this decision as it impacts those who are currently receiving subsidies for ObamaCare from the federal exchange because their state did not set up a state exchange. Republicans are still talking about a "fix" but are now stressing that it is to be "transitional" rather than permanent.  According to Bloomberg:
[Representative Dennis Ross of Florida] added, “There’s a strong consensus in that room” that the subsidies must be continued in some form “until Republicans can substantively change the law.” Participants at Wednesday’s closed-door meeting said key aspects of a transition plan were presented to lawmakers by Ryan, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia and Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline of Minnesota. Along with immediate repeal of the law’s individual and employer mandates, the plan would give states the option to build their own insurance exchanges and offer subsidies, using federal money. Alternatively, people in states affected by the ruling would receive a subsidy to purchase an insurance plan either from healthcare.gov or on the open market.

Posted by New Neo on June 11, 2015 20 Comments
Atlantic writer Russell Berman wonders:
...[Obama's] decision to champion his signature achievement in such pointed terms just weeks before the high court’s ruling is due raised the question of whether Obama was trying to jawbone the justices at the 11th hour. ...“It seems so cynical,” he said, “to want to take coverage away from millions of people; to take care away from people who need it the most; to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America.”... The speech came a day after the president, in response to a reporter’s question, commented directly on the case before the justices..."Under well-established precedent, there is no reason why the existing exchanges should be overturned through a court case," Obama said. "This should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn't even have been taken up," he added... [In 2012, Obama had] sharply warned the Court not to rule against his healthcare law the first time around. “I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said then.
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