Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Tomorrow is possible

But quite unlikely.

Again, for those who (having better things to do with your lives) do not follow the Supreme Court's every move, there is no official indication in advance as to which opinions the Court will hand down on a given day. All we know for certain is that the Justices will issue one or more opinions tomorrow. And those opinions could include HHS v. Florida, Florida v. HHS, and NFIB v. Sebelius.

The reasons almost everyone thinks that unlikely are (1) the decisions a are extremely complex (especially if the Court needs to get mired in the severability questions), (2) the cases are extremely important, such that the Justices want to take great care in crafting precisely what they write, (3) the issues are extremely contested, meaning there are apt to be sharp exchanges between the majority and dissenting Justices (requiring multiple revisions to capture the back-and-forth), and (4) the cases were argued in late March, giving the Court a relatively short time frame to accomplish all the writing. Together, these circumstances suggest the Court will probably use all the time available to complete these opinions.

So, we can all get on SCOTUSblog's live blog (which, by the way, is a terrific resource) tomorrow morning at 10:00 EDT to see what the Court does. But we are much more likely to find out whether the Stolen Valor Act is constitutional (and perhaps the ways in which the FCC can or cannot regulate "fleeting expletives") than whether the ACA is within Congress's enumerated powers.