TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures of the past week from the Beltway and beyond.
Supreme Court
Health Care After the Court: If the Individual Mandate Falls, What Next?
If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual health insurance mandate, but leaves most or all of the rest of the Affordable Care Act intact, Congress will have some work to do. Without some way to push uninsured healthy …
Supreme Court Health Care Protests in Pictures
TIME captures proponents and critics of the Affordable Care Act as they square off outside the Supreme Court, which is hearing arguments on the law’s constitutionality this week in Washington.
Stephen Colbert vs. the Supreme Court: Testing the Limits of Super-PAC Coordination
Stephen Colbert is laughing at the U.S. Supreme Court. He started Thursday night on his show, when he transferred control of his super PAC to his mentor, business partner and friend Jon Stewart. Here is the clip:
It’s a …
SCOTUS To Hear Obamacare Before Election
The U.S. Supreme Court granted cert (PDF) this morning in three cases challenging several key elements of President Barack Obama’s health-care reform law: whether Congress can force Americans to purchase health care; whether all or part of the rest of the law is constitutional if that one provision is not; whether the penalty for not …
Obama’s Health Reform Popularity Bind
After hovering around split support since its passage, Obama’s health care overhaul has taken a sizable popularity hit this month according to new data form the excellent Kaiser Family Foundation, with just 34% of Americans now expressing a favorable opinion of the law. The drop appears to be primarily driven by Democrats, whose approval …
Why Obama Wants a Supreme Court Fight on Health Reform in 2012
The Obama administration’s decision late Monday not to ask for a full court review of the August decision by two appeals court judges to strike down ObamaCare is a risky but potentially high-value play by the White House in the …
Rick Perry’s Social Security Conversation
Rick Perry wants to have a conversation about federal entitlement programs. That conversation is, in effect, about how to end them. “I would suggest a legitimate conversation about [letting] the states keep their money and implement the programs,” he said of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to Newsweek’s Andrew Romano last …
Health Care Challenges Reach Next Level in Climb Toward Supreme Court
Two legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act will be argued in a Virginia courtroom Tuesday morning, moving them one step closer to the U.S. Supreme Court. The first, filed by the Commonwealth of Virginia, has already scored a …
Kagan’s “Modest” Day 1
Day 1 is done in Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s hearings to become the 112th Supreme Court justice. Thus far there has been relatively little about Kagan herself. In between memorials for Senator Bobby Byrd and Sandra Day O’Connor’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband, Republicans griped that no matter what Kagan says, they don’t think …
The Kagan Chatter Gets Another Boost
Mike Madden, at Salon, uncovers another sign that the White House seems awfully interested in protecting the good name of Elena Kagan, one of the front runners for the open Supreme Court seat.
In the last couple of weeks, after Salon’s Glenn Greenwald linked to this post by Duke University law professor Guy-Uriel Charles raising
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SCOTUS Gets an Education in PDA In More Ways Than One
Listening to arguements today on The City of Ontario v. Quon — a case about whether police officers sexting each other on city-given pagers had an expectation of privacy — the Supreme were struggling a bit with the technology. You know you’re in trouble when the youngest guy on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, asks: “What’s the …
Quote of the Day
From the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in a sexting case earlier today (via the NYT):
Chief Justice Roberts warned against devising a legal rule that “would require people basically to have two of these things with them, two of whatever they are — the text messager or the BlackBerrys or whatever.”
Since when did Supreme Court …
