Tag: scotusblog

It’s SCOTUS Day!

Cases coming up at 10 AM.  Probably not the gay marriage one or the Obamacare one, but there’s some meaty cases likely to hit today.  Redistricting, EPA rules, housing, and lethal injection cases are left (SCOTUSBlog is, as always, tracking this stuff obsessively*), so one or more should show up today, more tomorrow, and the big guns next week.  Unless the Supreme Court decides to do how it pleases, which is what it typically pleases to do.  Either way, expect excitement this morning!

…God, I am such a nerd.  AND PROUD OF IT.

Moe Lane

*Although a lot of people will be tuning in later to see SCOTUSBlog’s possibly most popular feature: to wit, their responses to people who think that @SCOTUSBlog is the official Twitter account of the US Supreme Court.  Worth following for that, alone. Particularly if you think that people shouldn’t social media without at least taking a vision test.

Two kinds of people commenting about the Hobby Lobby case…

…the people who are familiar with the case and what was being argued; and then there’s the Activist Left.  The people who are familiar with the case understand that while Hobby Lobby did in fact get the ruling it wanted – to wit, that the company was not required to provide access to drugs that it considered to be abortifacients* – it is not all that broad a ruling.  Privately held companies have more protection here than publicly traded ones like, say, Wal-Mart or Boeing; it’s a win for religious liberty, but not a grand slam home run.  Again, those are the people who are familiar with the case.

And then there are these people:

scotusblog

Continue reading Two kinds of people commenting about the Hobby Lobby case…

Josh Marshall, on the oddity of keeping SCOTUSBlog from getting credentials.

I generally don’t agree with Josh Marshall about what color the sky is, but this is pretty much correct:

At the end of the day, all of it comes down to this. SCOTUSBlog is the preeminent source of real-time and journalistic reporting on the Supreme Court in the country. I say this with full knowledge that there are many extremely talented Supreme Court and legal affairs reporters working for various newspapers and news outlets. And it’s no disrespect at all to them. (I have no idea who the best individual Supreme Court reporter is.) The simple fact is that whenever a big case comes down, basically everyone goes to SCOTUSBlog to get the first read on what happened. This is quite simply a fact.

So you have this perverse situation in which what is arguably and close to objectively the top source of reporting and commentary on the Supreme Court being basically the only ones who aren’t credentialed to cover it. That’s the problem with this decision. From what I can see, the rules don’t at all prevent the committee from issuing SCOTUSBLog a credential. If the rules do, then the rules are outmoded and should change.

Continue reading Josh Marshall, on the oddity of keeping SCOTUSBlog from getting credentials.

@SCOTUSblog no longer permanently credentialed for Supreme Court.

This is… not optimal.

Continue reading @SCOTUSblog no longer permanently credentialed for Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Watch: Second day of three.

Cases announced today at 10 AM EDT. Assuming that Obamacare doesn’t get tossed/upheld/gutted/declared a tax, and assuming that the Court doesn’t decide the Arizona immigration case today, the most interesting one remaining is probably this one:

Knox v. Service Employees International Union

Argued on January 10, 2012

Plain English Issue: Whether a state can require its employees to pay a special union fee that will be spent for political purposes without first giving the employees information about the fee and a chance to object to it.

That Plain English thing that SCOTUSblog does is pretty useful, no? – Certainly AoSHQ thinks so, and I agree.