“Anthony Kennedy” on The Daily Caller

President Barack Obama has thrown down the gauntlet: if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down his precious health care law, he’ll make the courts an issue in the presidential campaign. (more)

One year after President Barack Obama signed his health care bill into law, a majority of states are battling to overturn it in federal court while Republicans dismantle the law piece-by-piece in Congress and thirst for full repeal. (more)

At Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker notes that the “E-Verify” program,” which “electronically checks to make sure a … newly hired employee’s name matches his social security number, is one of the few interior immigration enforcement measures that works, does so humanely, and has significant bipartisan support.” Expanding E-Verify is one of the likelier areas of immigration legislation in the current Congressional session.  And three states have mandated E-Verify for all businesses (see map). (more)

Yesterday, a federal judge in Florida declared unconstitutional Obamacare’s mandate that all Americans purchase health insurance — the linchpin of the unpopular law rammed through last March by congressional Democrats. If the mandate is ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court, Obamacare will unravel and Congress will have little choice but to reopen the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for amendment. That would enable us to reverse the government takeover and adopt a patient-centered approach. (more)

The following is an open letter from Carol Taber, the president of Family Security Matters, to President Obama.  (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court opened its new term with Justice Elena Kagan on the bench. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — First Amendment cases top the Supreme Court’s docket as it begins a new term with a new justice and three women on the bench for the first time. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will decide whether the estate of Anna Nicole Smith should get part of the fortune left behind by the elderly Texas billionaire whom Smith married in the mid-1990s. (more)

When Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case that will determine Californians’ right to define one of their most sacred institutions, reaches the Supreme Court, all eyes will be on Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Having authored the Court’s only two opinions expressly favoring the rights of homosexuals, and finding himself the perennial tie-breaker flanked by four reliable conservatives and four reliable liberals, Kennedy will almost certainly author the opinion that decides whether a state may continue to adhere to the traditional definition of marriage as one man and one woman.  Yet, with tensions high on both sides of the debate, few can get a read on which way Kennedy is likely to vote. (more)

In an emergency appeal now before a federal court, the backers of Proposition 8 have asked for a permanent hold on last week’s “egregiously selective and one-sided” marriage ruling, contending it flouted the law and ignored the evidence. (more)

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy eventually will get his hands on California’s gay marriage ban. (more)

A buddy in Memphis e-mailed me the following, which has been described (presumably by men) as the “joke of the year”: (more)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed without comment a ruling upholding a ban on so-called soft-money contributions to political parties. (more)

The Supreme Court has just held that violent juveniles cannot be given a life sentence without the opportunity for parole, unless they succeed in killing their victim. Even torturers and rapists who attempt to commit murder cannot be denied the opportunity for release under the court’s decision Monday in Graham v. Florida. (more)

The realm of judicial nominations has a lexicon all its own, where coded Washington language takes on extra layers of complexity. When President Obama nominated his first judge to the Supreme Court last year, the word of the hour was “empathy.” This time, the term is “consensus builder.” Judicial monastery“ and “constitutional core values” have been bandied about. And what would a debate over judges be without use of “judicial activism“? (more)

President Obama’s is at odds with his Democratic base on who he should pick to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. (more)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court struggled Monday with whether a state-run law school may refuse to recognize a religious student group that excludes gay students and non-Christians. (more)

“It is my belief that there are ‘absolutes’ in the Bill of Rights and they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be absolutes….[The first Amendment] provides, in simple words, that ‘Congress make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or the press. I read ‘no law abridging” to mean ‘no law abridging.’” — the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black (more)

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Citizens United v. FEC, Jefferson Smith, Jimmy Stewart’s archetypal hero who arrived in our nation’s capital to take on the special interests, may never have made it to Washington. The film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, after all, was speech funded by a corporation. As pointed out by Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority in Citizens United, some officials at the time discouraged the film’s distribution because they did not like its criticism of Congress. Under prior precedent governing our campaign finance laws, such officials could have gone even farther and banned the film outright. (more)

The Supreme Court seemed likely to deny the National Football League its long-sought goal of broad protection from antitrust suits, the big issue behind a narrower case concerning a license for making souvenir caps. (more)