Supreme Court Early Warning
Linda Greenhouse, NYT
APRIL 2, 2014
Someone at the Supreme Court got an assignment last week: start drafting a majority opinion to answer the question whether a for-profit company can claim a religious exemption from the federal requirement to include particular products in any employee insurance plan.
That’s Hobby Lobby, of course (along with its companion case, Conestoga Wood Specialties.) Did the way I just described it, without mentioning birth control, make a difference to the valence of the case?
The products at issue, as everyone knows, are the contraceptives that the two corporations’ owners object to covering under their employee health plans. But once launched, one of dozens of such attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the case was never going to be so narrowly confined, as last week’s argument made clear. How about vaccinations? Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know. How about blood transfusions? Justice Elena Kagan observed: “So one religious group could opt out of this, and another religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform.” Indeed.
Naturally, I’d like to know which justice got the majority-opinion assignment. To know the identity of any one of eight potential authors would be to know the outcome, although not necessarily the breadth or rationale of the eventual opinion. The exception, of course, is a ninth justice, Anthony M. Kennedy. To learn that he received the assignment would amount to being condemned to breath-holding until June. To be able predict the outcome, it would be vital to know what Justice Kennedy thinks the case is about.
(More here.)
APRIL 2, 2014
That’s Hobby Lobby, of course (along with its companion case, Conestoga Wood Specialties.) Did the way I just described it, without mentioning birth control, make a difference to the valence of the case?
The products at issue, as everyone knows, are the contraceptives that the two corporations’ owners object to covering under their employee health plans. But once launched, one of dozens of such attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the case was never going to be so narrowly confined, as last week’s argument made clear. How about vaccinations? Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know. How about blood transfusions? Justice Elena Kagan observed: “So one religious group could opt out of this, and another religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform.” Indeed.
Naturally, I’d like to know which justice got the majority-opinion assignment. To know the identity of any one of eight potential authors would be to know the outcome, although not necessarily the breadth or rationale of the eventual opinion. The exception, of course, is a ninth justice, Anthony M. Kennedy. To learn that he received the assignment would amount to being condemned to breath-holding until June. To be able predict the outcome, it would be vital to know what Justice Kennedy thinks the case is about.
(More here.)
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