Well, well, well. The Senate Judiciary Committee has created a new subcommittee this year to specifically oversee the federal courts and the nation’s bankruptcy system, including administration and management, judicial rules, the creation of new judgeships. Last session’s Administrative Oversight and the Courts Subcommittee has been split into two separate subcommittees for this session. Senator […]

Two days ago, Dan posted an entry by run75441 titled “SCOTUS Chastises Congress and the Executive Branch.”  The post’s title wasn’t quite accurate; run’s post was about Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual state-of-the-judicial-branch report, in which he was writing in his capacity as administrative head of that branch, not in his actual judicial capacity, and […]

The second biggest surprise of the day, after the survival of the Affordable Care Act, is that we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts. How else to explain today’s outpouring of praise, not merely for the decision but for the man himself, for his statesmanship and judicial modesty? All these years, […]

Some people think Roberts cleverly used this case to severely limit Congress’s regulatory powers.  Others strongly disagree. I’m with the others. I think that as a practical matter, this will have almost no limiting effect at all on Congress’s regulatory powers.  I can’t think of any circumstance in which this limitation would apply and in […]

I think there was a clue to Roberts’ thinking during the first day of argument—during the argument on the applicability of the Anti-Injunction Act, an obscure “jurisdictional” statute, which precludes courts from ruling on the constitutionality of a federal tax until after the statute becomes effective and the tax actually is due.  Roberts really indicated […]