President Obama’s sweeping change in immigration policy, designed to allow more than four million non-citizens who entered the U.S. illegally to remain in the country, on Friday withstood a new challenge before a federal appeals court — but only for a technical reason. Two opinions issued in the new case, however, contained starkly differing reactions to… Read More
Making same-sex marriage a reality: The final steps
Demonstrating that the Supreme Court may rule but may not always command, the process of making same-sex marriage available nationwide is still unfolding, some six weeks after the Justices decided in its favor. Political resistance is developing in many places, but the legal process is moving ahead — state by state — to make same-sex… Read More
Individual insurance mandate survives again
A new challenge to the federal mandate that most Americans must obtain health insurance or pay a penalty stirred up a major constitutional debate in a federal appeals court on Friday. However, in the end, all eleven judges — relying on sharply conflicting views — rejected the challenge.
Texas voter ID law ruled invalid — in part
Acting one day before the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s most important voting rights law, a federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that Texas will be barred from enforcing at least part of its four-year-old law that requires a photo ID before a voter can go to the polls. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals… Read More
Ban on contractors’ political donations upheld
Finding that the problem of corruption in government contracting is still a major civic scandal, a unanimous federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected a new constitutional challenge to the seventy-five-year-old ban on political contributions by individuals who are hired under contract to do work for federal agencies — an increasing way that federal agency tasks… Read More
A new look at race and politics in redistricting
Twenty-four hours after giving constitutional backing for Arizona’s use of an independent commission to draw new election district maps for its members of Congress, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took on a case complaining that the same state agency wrongly used race and partisanship in crafting state legislative district boundaries.
Pressing the ACA birth-control issue
This post also appears on scotusblog.com The federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate moved again on Tuesday to make sure that the Justices are keeping up with the government’s success in heading off a round of new challenges to the birth-control mandate in the Affordable Care Act. In the second letter of its kind, Solicitor General… Read More
Is the New Deal in new trouble?
This post also appears on scotusblog.com One of the more durable legacies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s was the idea that the farm economy can be bolstered by paying growers to keep some of their crop off the market, or paying them not to grow some of it at all. One of those programs… Read More
Texas abortion case reaches the Court
This post also appears on scotusblog.com Abortion clinics and doctors in Texas asked the Supreme Court on Friday night to delay enforcement of a 2013 state abortion law while an appeal to the Justices is pursued. Without a postponement, the lengthy application said, more than half of the existing nineteen clinics in Texas will have… Read More
Appeals court sharply narrows war crimes prosecutions
This post also appears on scotusblog.com In a ruling that significantly narrows Congress’s power to use military courts to try war crimes cases, a result likely to be tested in the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday threw out the last remaining conviction of a propagandist for… Read More