On the other side, there’s, well, exactly the same thing.

So perhaps it is not surprising that on the important social issues that came before the Supreme Court this term, Maryland’s Democratic Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Virginia Republican Ken Cuccinelli II took opposite paths.

The ambiguities, contradictions and unaddressed consequences in federal statutes keep the court in business. And in interpreting Congress’s work, justices employ all manner of tools, including other statutes, the court’s own precedents and sometimes a good dictionary.

“A law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right?” President Obama told a gathering of newspaper editors last week.

But for now, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who will represent the United States when the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the nation’s health-care overhaul, is focusing on the “it’s an honor” part.

Irony alert: One of her legal lifelines is the decision that still enrages some of her fellow party members — the Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore .

Heeeeere’s Antonin, in a faked photograph that makes it appear he wears nothing beneath his judicial robe but black socks and garters.

But the Obama administration last week asked a San Francisco appeals court to overturn a recent decision that said bone marrow donors can be paid for what their bodies produce.

In a rare afternoon session only a month after accepting the case, the court will hear a Texas redistricting dispute that is complicated in every way except its bottom line: four new congressional seats that have the potential to decide which party controls the House of Representatives.

Conservative activists and commentators are hoping the answer is yes, and want the court to reexamine its 2003 decision that state universities may consider an applicant’s race — in a limited way — in assembling diverse student bodies.

Davis, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, explains:

“I would instruct the national security official in a Gingrich administration to ignore the Supreme Court on issues of national security,” he told the conservatives gathering at the Values Voter Summit.

At 91, without the judicial robe he wore for 41 years, Stevens gives speeches, writes book reviews, has completed a memoir of the court and regularly critiques the work of his former Supreme Court colleagues.

More than two-thirds of Americans say they would vote for their party’s “well-qualified gay candidate for president.”

The first openly gay male federal judge was just confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate, and President Obama has nominated four other gay candidates for the bench.

They’ve been on a losing streak in the lower courts.

The activists found the holy grail in 2008 when the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller said the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to own a firearm unconnected to military service. The court followed it up with McDonald v. Chicago two years later, holding that the amendment applies not just to gun control laws passed by Congress but to local and state laws as well.

“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger .

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor have emerged in their relatively short time on the bench as two of the court’s most outspoken members on criminal justice issues. Sometimes they speak in unison, but when they disagree they often represent the court’s ideological divide.

When Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson decided to start a new civil rights education organization that would bear their famous names, they sealed the deal in a fitting local spot: Cafe Reconcile.

He and his parents would like the U.S. government to agree.

The court’s January 2010 decision freeing corporations and unions to spend whatever they like for and against candidates wiped out laws in 24 states banning such spending. Only Montana still wages a lonely court battle to maintain the ban.

The administration wants the justices to overturn a decision last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that said police must get a warrant before launching a long-term surveillance of a suspect using a global positioning device attached to the man’s car.

Boumediene v. Bush established the role of the judiciary in wartime, and seemed to settle important issues about separation of powers. It featured soaring rhetoric about the republic’s enduring guarantees.

“We lie to protect our privacy (‘No, I don’t live around here’); to avoid hurt feelings (‘Friday is my study night’); to make others feel better (‘Gee, you’ve gotten skinny’); to avoid recriminations (‘I only lost $10 at poker’),” Kozinski wrote recently in a case about an inveterate liar named Xavier Alvarez who, just to drive home the point, is also known as Javier Alvarez.

That would be four to five days, in case you’re wondering. This last tidbit of information was read to a federal jury here Wednesday by Abbe Lowell, the lead defense attorney for former senator John Edwards, who is accused of violating campaign finance laws by allegedly failing to report $1 million spent to cover up his affair with Hunter during the 2008 presidential campaign.

It won’t have anything to do with a business deal gone awry, or Americans dropping health coverage during the recession. Instead, $1 trillion is the amount of revenue that health insurance plans can expect to lose if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. The Court is expected to issue its opinion in late June

“I don’t know who was handing out this literature,” she says, “but I think we’ve got to talk about this a little bit.”

He was a lollygagger compared with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R). Five minutes after Obama put pen to bill, Cuccinelli’s aides were heading to the courthouse to file his first-in-the-nation lawsuit challenging the law.

Opponents of same-sex marriage argue that, with few exceptions, marriage has always been about uniting the two sexes and linking mother and father to children. Change that, and marriage ceases to be marriage.

His book “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” is a love song to the idea that this country merits “the protection of Providence” and has a singular “calling” to be a beacon for freedom. A major theme for him on the campaign trail is the nation’s divine destiny, a heritage Romney said has made him “stand a little taller, a little straighter” when overseas.

Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes:

The New Jersey legislation would have created a state health insurance exchange, the marketplace where individuals could use federal subsidies to purchase coverage. Christie contends that the state should not put resources toward such a project with Obamacare’s fate still to be decided by the Supreme Court.

Phil Gingrey, a Republican Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, tells The Hill’s Sam Baker that there’s no need to replace the law, after all: “I don’t believe we need to have another big omnibus bill that we’re going to roll out.” Senator Jim DeMint says the same thing: “Republicans shouldn’t repeat the Democrats’ mistake of rushing through our own big bill.”  Of course, regardless of what they say, all we really need to pay attention to is what they do: no committee hearings, no legislation, no nothing.

The 60-year-old Keenan said she is leaving out of concern for the future of the pro-choice movement — and thinks she could be holding it back.In recent years, Keenan has worried about an “intensity gap” on abortion rights among millennials, which the group considers to be the generation of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. While most young, antiabortion voters see abortion as a crucial political issue, NARAL’s own internal research does not find similar passion among abortion-rights supporters. If the pro-choice movement is to successfully defend abortion rights, Keenan contends, it needs more young people in leadership roles, including hers.

But he still had one very important bargaining chip: his endorsement.

For one thing, Democrats up and down the ticket will be asked their position on the issue. Clarity is important for voters, so I would find this a very positive development. But for Democrats in swing states and districts this may get dicey. These are the very Democrats (red state senators and Blue Dog Democrats) who may already be at risk because of their votes on Obamacare and the stimulus. Do they part with the president, or take their chances with anti-gay marriage voters? This may be one more reason moderate Democrats choose not to campaign with Obama.

Take, for example, her handling of the effort to get India to reduce — if not eliminate — its purchases of crude oil from Iran. The idea, of course, is to strengthen the sanctions against Iran in hopes of preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.

The proposed regulation implements a two-year pay increase included in the 2010 health-care law. The increase, effective in 2013 and 2014, brings primary care fees for Medicaid, which covers indigent patients, in line with those for Medicare, which insures the elderly and some disabled patients.

For a decade now, the formula that supposedly sets Medicare’s budget has returned results that fall far short of the program’s actual costs. So every year, Congress passes legislation to make up the difference — often after a drawn-out fight. Legislators work up through the Christmas holidays, doctor payments get delayed and patients get nervous. But without fail, a short-term doc-fix always passes. Then it runs out, a year or so later, and Washington goes through the same policy dance all over again.

For activists who want to stamp out illegal immigration, the presidency is rather besides the point, at least while Mitt Romney is the nominee.

“I could write in my mother’s name. I really wouldn’t make any difference, because nobody’s listening to me anyhow,” says Dan Beck, a cop and former sheriff from Ohio’s Allen County, who still wears a sheriff’s pin on his jacket lapel.

It’s a question of considerable debate among top strategists for both parties. And the answer is not insignificant when it comes to the electoral map, either. Arizona will award 11 electoral votes in November, the largest prize of any of the southwestern states — including Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado — expected to be seriously contested this fall.

But Romney was cagey about what, exactly, that would mean: His only specific prediction was that Obama would “remake” the Supreme Court. So it was helpful when, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner a week ago, the president opened up about the “secret agenda” he has planned. “In my first term,” he joked, “we ended the war in Iraq; in my second term, I will win the war on Christmas. . . . In my first term, we passed health-care reform; in my second term, I guess I’ll pass it again.”

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will chip in $1.9 billion of start-up costs to get Oregon’s Medicaid reforms going. In return, Oregon made a big promise: The state says it will keep its Medicaid costs growing 2 percent slower than in previous years.

Obama is ahead of the presumed Republican presidential nominee by 51 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. And Romney does no better against Obama than he did in a Post poll a year ago, despite his emergence as the GOP standard-bearer.

The Dutch are far from the most thrifty spenders when it comes to health care. In the Commonwealth Fund’s new comparison of 13 countries, the Netherlands is the second-highest spender as a percent of their economy (coming in, to no great surprise, right after the United States).

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]]> http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=c605fb1450c8e1bc046dc63a693c81bd http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romney-campaigns-misleading-stats-women-in-the-obama-economy/2012/05/01/gIQA0JWluT_blog.html?wprss=rss_courts_law http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romney-campaigns-misleading-stats-women-in-the-obama-economy/2012/05/01/gIQA0JWluT_blog.html?wprss=rss_courts_law http://www.washingtonpost.com/Fragment/SysConfig/WebPortal/twpweb/rss/mobile/blog-entry.jpp?id=1000.4.915269394 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romney-campaigns-misleading-stats-women-in-the-obama-economy/2012/05/01/gIQA0JWluT_blog.html?wprss=rss_courts_law http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romney-campaigns-misleading-stats-women-in-the-obama-economy/2012/05/01/gIQA0JWluT_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romney-campaigns-misleading-stats-women-in-the-obama-economy/2012/05/01/gIQA0JWluT_search.html 1000.4.915269394 5a55f8b2-93b5-11e1-803f-df78569168e8 Issues Barack Obama Democratic Party health insurance Wed, 2 May 2012 05:02:00 EST Wed, 2 May 2012 17:59:53 EST 20120502225953 The Washington Post /WashingtonPost/Content/Blogs/fact-checker/201205/gillespiewomen2.xml /WashingtonPost/Content/Blogs/fact-checker/201205/gillespiewomen2.xml BlogStory courts_law.dwp:content_well/grid-courts_law-newswell.dwc:col2/story-courts_law-NW3.dwc:story BlogStory The Washington Post Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler asked the state’s highest court to overturn — or at least suspend — last week’s ruling that prohibits DNA collection from suspects charged but not yet convicted in violent crimes, saying he plans to challenge the decision with the U.S. Supreme Court if the state judges do not reverse themselves.

The race in Iowa’s Third Congressional District between Reps. Leonard Boswell (D) and Tom Latham (R) is one of just a few this year that pits incumbents against each other.

The race in Iowa’s Third Congressional District between Reps. Leonard Boswell (D) and Tom Latham (R) is one of just a few this year that pit incumbents against each other.

The panel approved the measure 2 to 1, with the Democratic commissioners in favor and the lone Republican opposed.

Bicego isn’t affiliated with any university or government agency. She isn’t a household name in health policy. She works in a nondescript cubicle in downtown Boston, on the 10th floor of a nondescript office building.

That’s the pitch we’ve made for more than four decades at the Center for American Women and Politics, asking women from both parties to consider running for office. We have a simple, logical progression in mind: Women who see a policy or situation that raises their ire should channel their energy into candidacies, which would lead to more women in office. Now the 2012 campaign season, with its attacks on access to contraception and its dismal economic climate, has added urgency to the message.

In a 2010 video brought to light by frequent EPA foe Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., EPA Region VI Administrator Al Almendariz said that he gave the following analogy to his staff about his “philosophy of enforcement,” which he acknowledged being crude and perhaps inappropriate, but shared anyway: ”It is kind of like how the Romans used to conquer villages in the Mediterranean — they’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere and they’d find the first five guys they saw, they’d crucify ’ em, and that little town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”